It is a well known fact that spam takes advantage of any possible means to propagate itself and one of the oldest tricks in the book is to play off a current event or celebration, such as the 4th of July. Marshal's TRACE team (short for Threat Research and Content Engineering) warns us about 4th of July related spam. According to the e-mail and Internet security company, you should be cautious with messages inviting you to view a greeting card. And in other related news, on this 4th of July we celebrate one year since the first Storm e-card campaign was launched.

Here is a simple break down of what will happen. You will receive a message from what seems to be a greeting cards site, with a catchy, festive title. Here are some examples from last year's Storm 4th of July campaign: "Americas B-DAy, Independence Day At The Park, God Bless America"; all these messages seemed to come from greeting-cards.com. Upon opening the message you will see a text inviting you to check out the greeting card that a coworker, classmate, friend, etc. has sent you. If you click on that link the file ecard.exe will be executed, leaving you infected. You will be one more addition to an already large botnet.

Bradley Anstis, product management director with Marshal comments: "Today's run of the Storm Trojan using the Fourth of July as its hook continues this theme of exploiting current events to entice unsuspecting email users into infecting themselves."

The Storm Trojan first surfaced in early 2007 and was very good at spreading itself around the Internet. It lured unwary PC users to Storm infected sites by sending spam messages with catchy titles related to popular current events. Storm has been dethroned by Srizbi, which is responsible for 50% of all spam messages in the world.