Waledac Prepared to Create Nuisance on the US Independence Day

Security firm ESET's researchers recently claimed that they have come to know from some reliable sources that Waledac botnet is gearing up to trigger a spam campaign on the Independence day of the US, which is just round the corner (July 4, 2009), reported pitchengine.com on July 3, 2009.

Researchers examining the worm's code have found that a minimum of 18 domain names associated with fireworks and Independence Day have been registered. These are expected to be used in dodging people by making them to visit a malicious website, revealed Pierre-Marc Bureau, Senior Researcher at ESET, reported cnet news on July 2, 2009.

Indeed, the spam campaign may commence anytime till the end of this week, i.e. July 5, 2009. As per reports, spam e-mail is expected to hit the inboxes of the netizens alongwith a message that will urge them to view a video of the Independence Day. It will also contain a link that will direct the recipient to a site, which if double-clicked will download a malware on to his PC rather than playing video. This malware will convert the user's PC into a bot on Waledac botnet.

As per the estimations of the ESET, the Waledac botnet is extremely large in size, constituting of tens of thousands of bots at current.

Security firm believes that over 20,000 hacked systems will be employed in the work of distributing malicious Independence Day e-mails, just in an attempt to enhance the size of the Waledac botnet. If successful, cyber criminals will be able to distribute the spam even on a much higher scale.

In the meanwhile, it is learnt that the Waledac botnet family has been there since the end of 2008, exploiting events like Valentine's Day or Christmas so as to propagate in a way similar to the nasty Storm Worm.

ESET further stated that the level of Waledac worm's new variants has been detected very low, as only a few anti-virus solutions have been able to detect the budding threat. Finally, the security firm has advised people not to click open the link provided in any of the unsolicited e-mails regardless of the source.

» SPAMfighter News - 04-07-2009

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