Tuesday, 23 January 2007

New 'Storm Worm' Traget PCs

The new 'Storm Worm' seems to be brewing a storm. "It’s been the busiest weekend we’ve had in several months or perhaps a year," Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finnish anti-virus vendor F-Secure, said. "We rarely see such large trojan spam runs anymore"...

The new 'Storm Worm' seems to be brewing a storm. "It’s been the busiest weekend we’ve had in several months or perhaps a year," Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finnish anti-virus vendor F-Secure, said. "We rarely see such large trojan spam runs anymore."

Security firm Commtouch has reported that the trojan was responsible for about 17 per cent of e-mails worldwide.

"By distributing so many variants simultaneously, the malware distributors overwhelm signature-based anti-virus engines, effectively guaranteeing that they will not block them," said Haggai Carmon, Commtouch’s vice president of products.

The malware arrives as part of an e-mail claming to contain a video attachment of a current news story. The attacks are mostly targeting home users, Hypponen said.

"Corporate networks filter .exe attachments at the gateway anyway, so why bother?" he said.

Another security firm, SoftScan has revealed that the people behind Storm Worm have continued to widely spam variants throughout the weekend, but they are putting a considerable amount of effort into avoiding detection, since each new variant at outbreak specifically designed not to be picked up by anti-virus scanners.

“I think it’s very easy to become complacent about viruses and worms because there hasn’t been many large outbreaks just recently and normally many of the anti-virus vendors are able to create signatures for their databases that generically pick up the current malware and any of the subsequent variants,” comments Diego d’Ambra CTO of SoftScan. “The people behind Storm Worm have now shown us that it’s something they are aware of and I think we will start to see more malware like this in the future.”