Malware authors have incorporated technology designed to find the geographic location of prospective marks as a tactic to enable more convincing social engineering scams.

A new variant of the Waledac worm uses an email message claiming a "dirty bomb" explosion in order to tempt the gullible into visiting a maliciously-constructed website posing as the homepage of news agency Reuters. This website uses a GEO-IP lookup to customise the story so as to appear that the explosion appeared in a city or location near the surfer viewing it.

Write-ups of this geo-targeted malware attack, currently doing the rounds, can be found in security blogs run by Websense (here) and Sophos (here). ®

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