Spammers Spread Malware Under Beijing Earthquake Garb

As per the news published by theregister on June 19, 2008, botnet operators are suspected of using fictitious reports of an earthquake around Beijing, with claims that it could hamper the Olympic Games in August 2008, to spread their malware.

As these bogus reports unveil, Sophos, a leading security firm, has recommended Internet users to ignore any e-mail that claims of giving information on a disaster, or an impending one, to rock China.

Sophos verified a few samples of the bogus alarming email and revealed that some of them using subject lines with far-fetched claims like "Million dead in Chinese quake" and contain a link that redirects to a Website with a .cn domain.

Security Researchers have confirmed that this site makes false claims of a quake, with a Richter scale magnitude of 9.0*, to have hit Beijing killing millions of people and throwing the Olympic Games' preparations out of gear.

Additional reports revealed that this page hosts a link that seems to open a video, but instead downloads the malicious Nuwar-E worm onto the Windows boxes that might fall prey to ruse.

Cyber security company, Sophos, reported that the .cn domain that hosts the malicious link is likely to spread through a botnet. Every DNS query made for the domain gives back a different IP address, thereby, indicating that a vast network of infected computers is being used as the server for the malware, as reported by theregister on June 19, 2008.

Sophos said that the memories of the recent earthquake in the Szchuen province of China is still fresh in the minds of the Chinese, they are more prone to open any file making such a disturbing claim, thus, easily falling prey to the conning malware.

Symantec, another internet security firm, has also issued warnings regarding a new worm attack of the Storm variant. This worm is also using a similar trick of sending earthquake warnings ahead of the imminent Chinese Olympics to spread the malware.

Meanwhile, not only malware authors, but also hackers are on drive to make full use of the impending China Olympics.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 7/5/2008