14 DAY TRIAL // A mass e-mail which appears to be a request for aid to help the victims of last month's Asian tsunami disaster is actually another means for spreading a computer virus, Web security company Sophos said Monday.
Media friendly Sophos reports on its website that the worm appears with the header "Tsunami donation! Please help!" and urges recipients to open an attachment called "tsunami.exe".
If opened, the virus forwards itself to everyone in the user's address book and attempts to launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against a German hacking website.
This is the first computer malware to take advantage of the Asian tragedy that took place end of last year, even though another virus surfaced earlier this month spreading the message that the tsunami was God's revenge on "people who did bad on earth." There have also been other scams circling the disaster, all variations on the famous Nigerian letters, where readers are invited to send their details and bank account info for them to help transfer huge amounts of money and get their fair share.
One seems to be from a wealthy Thai merchant suffering from a deadly disease that has lost his family in the tsunami disaster and needs someone to collect millions of U.S. dollars from a European security firm to distribute it to charities.
Security companies recommend users not to open the emails requesting such help and deleting the attachments at one.