14 DAY TRIAL // Many people were expecting this and now it came true. Muammad Gaddafi's death is the subject of a malware spreading campaign that promises hot pictures of the dictator.
Graham Cluley provides an example of a spam message that started landing in the inboxes of internauts not long ago. It pretends to be coming from the AFP news agency to make the whole scam seem more legit, but in fact, it's nothing but a classic internet threat.
One of the discovered messages reads:
Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, the most wanted man in the world, has been killed, the country's rebel government claimed Oct. 20. The flamboyant tyrant who terrorized his country and much of the world during his 42 years of despotic rule was cornered by insurgents in the town of Sirte, where Gadhafi had been born and a stronghold of his supporters.
The archive entitled “Bloody Photos_Gadhafi_Death.rar“ in fact contains a script file that's actually Mal/Behav-103, a malicious worm that replicates itself across the networks it encounters. The malware family is known to place itself into the PC's registries to make sure it is executed each time the devices is powered on, also becoming more difficult to remove.
It might be tempting to find out what's behind the email, but in most cases you'll probably just end up with an infected machine instead of a picture or any other promised element.
If you really want to get informed on a hot topic, the best thing to do is to visit trusted news sites, instead of quickly opening attachments you've just received via email. Even if they seem to be coming from one of your friends, you cannot trust the content of such an alert.
Spoofed addresses and even phished email accounts are often used to gain someone's trust as hackers noticed these are the most efficient ways of spreading their evil plots.