April Storm

April Fools’ Day emails contain new variant of infamous worm.

Security researchers report a new wave of spam emails being sent out. The emails, which use subject lines such as ‘Gotcha! April Fool!’ or ‘Surprise! The joke’s on you.’, contain a small piece of text, an image as well as a link to an IP-based URI where the recipient is supposed to download the ‘joke’. Instead of a joke, they will download a rather humourless

.exe

file which contains a new version of the Storm worm.

The Storm worm, which is also dubbed ‘Nuwar’ or ‘Dorf’, was first seen in the early days of 2007 and has been active ever since. The Storm botnet is believed to contain millions of infected computers.

A

quantitative assessment

of the Storm web threat during 2007 will be presented by

Trend Micro

‘s Raimund Genes, Anthony Arrott and David Sancho at VB2008 in Ottawa this October. VB2008 takes place 1-3 October 2008 in Ottawa, Canada,

registration

for VB2008 has now opened.

More on the current wave of Storm emails can be found at

Sophos


here

and at

Trend Micro


here

.

In the meantime, possibly inspired by Storm’s botherders, more positive news can be found at

F-Secure


here

and at

Sophos


here

.

Posted on 1 April 2008 by

Virus Bulletin