Hackers exploit China earthquake to punt Trojan
Sadly predictable
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Unscrupulous virus writers have inevitably latched onto the Chinese earthquake disaster, which killed more than 50,000, to punt malware. The Trojan-laced email attacks follow earlier phishing scams themed around the Sichuan province disaster.
Emails with infected Word attachments contaminated by MalDoc-Fam Trojan are being distributed in messages the pose as news about the disaster, net security firm Sophos reports. The malware-tainted emails typically appear with body text suggesting they contain news from China's official press agency, Xinhua.
BEIJING, May 20 (Xinhua) -- The death toll from the earthquake in southwest China's Sichuan Province has risen to 34,074 nationwide as of 2 p.m. Saturday, while 198,347 people were injured, according to the Information Office of the State Council. Pay attention to attachment for more.
Opening the attached Word document triggers an exploit that downloads malware onto vulnerable Windows PCs. The MalDoc-Fam Trojan is more than a year old, dating from March 2007.
Malware authors commonly exploit natural disasters to spread their wares. Similar attacks followed the London transport suicide bombing attacks of 2005, Hurricane Katrina, and the Asian tsunami of 2004. ®
COMMENTS
It goes without saying really
The term hacker really is the wrong term to apply. Hackers have morals. Hackers break into systems and steal information, or post viral software to gather information, but true hackers would never dream of leaching off the back of other peoples misery caused by a global disaster.
Whoever started this scam is not a hacker by any stretch of the imagination. They are scum who does hackers a disservice and I would urge all real hackers to target the person who started this and take them down. They are a disgrace to humanity and in my eyes even the shit that I scrape off my size 11 new rock boots has more decency!!!
To all who have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of this disaster, my deepest sympathies go out to you.
To the scum who try to make money off the backs of other peoples suffering:
I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL!!!
I think the cracker, hacker distinction is still valid
It is not that hard to use cracker instead of hacker. Whenever I see hacker and something bad in headlines, I immediately think some bit of clever code went awry.
Inevitably it turns out to be someone cracking, though.
Yes, it is just takes a bit of effort to use the word cracker, and I think we can take the word hacker back. To get hacker back we use the word cracker more, until it seeps in.
The word cracker is more descriptive of the activity as well, we should also track down the first person who screwed it up publicly and give them a roasting, ironically it is probably going to turn out to be some hack :).
And, for a little payback we could take one of their interests and start to place a negative meaning around that word, use it to describe all manner of nefarious activities.
It is annoying not being able to convey that a hack is bit of clever code, that is not perhaps orthodox without someone thinking you are accusing them of unauthorized access.
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