Spyware Threats

Christmas Storm Makes New Victims

New avalanche of threats spotted these days

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

27th of December 2007, 09:01 GMT

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Remember the latest Storm that infected a huge number of computers? Well, it's back. This time, it comes with Christmas-related offerings. Just like usual, the most dangerous threat is delivered by email, so in case you receive suspect messages, you're

advised to delete them as soon as possible. Most emails claim they offer season greetings and attempt to deploy Trojan horses on the vulnerable system. Usually, the Storm aims to exploit vulnerabilities found in the software installed on people's computers, such as third-party applications or even the Windows operating system powered by the software giant, Microsoft.

Roger Thompson, of Exploit Prevention Labs, wrote that several solutions, including GomPlayer, an application that is "very popular in South Korea", was targeted by the Storm infections.

"The second point is that 3rd party dlls continue to provide the attack points for new exploits. This is kind of interesting, and either means that Microsoft is patching faster than the exploits are coming out, or 3rd parties are not patching fast enough, or perhaps both", Roget Thompson wrote.

"Of course, this also highlights that the Bad Guys don't want or need a massive number of infections... they couldn't handle that... all they want is enough to make a profit. Folks, they're farming the Internet."

This is not something new and we have all expected to see a rise in the number of the web attacks around Christmas. But as you can see, the scams become more and more powerful and powerful security measures are almost a "must have". So, next time you see suspect emails containing attachments that doesn't seem to be legitimate, you'd better ignore them and delete the messages as soon as possible. Until we'll see next signs of Storm, keep an eye on the news to learn how to protect yourself! I bet we'll see a new attack in the next few days...

TAGS:

security | storm | christmas | infection

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