Storm Worms exploit April Fools

Lazy attack aims to dupe the credulous

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Anti-Virus, 1st April 2008 13:45 GMT

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The miscreants behind the Storm Worm botnet have taken advantage of April Fools' day in a bid to infect more Windows PCs.

Security firms are warning users to avoid the temptation to click on April Fools' day emails that may redirect them to maliciously constructed websites.

The latest attempt to dupe more gullible users into getting their PCs infected kicked off on Monday with a spam campaign designed to trick recipients into visiting websites under the control of hackers containing executables with names such such as foolsday.exe, Kickme.exe or funny.exe.

So far the miscreants punting the scam haven't even bothered to include exploit code, net security firm F-secure notes. Potential marks are simply invited to download the malware, promoted via a spam mail campaign.

These spam emails feature Subject Lines such as "April Fool’s Day" and an equally unimaginative choice of images.

Trend Micro reports that the miscreants behind the attack were too indolent to actually create their own image to represent the holiday, so they simply Googled "April Fools" and used the first image that showed up.

The creators of the Storm Worm have a history of using holidays and special events as lures for their malware. The last major Storm run was in the weeks leading up to Valentine's Day.

As before, the latest spam campaign is designed to infect new computers that will then become part of the larger Storm Worm botnet. These compromised PCs can then be hired out to spammers, miscreants interested in running denial of service attacks, adware distributors, and other internet denizens. ®

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