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Spam Distributing Trojan Haunts European Countries

According to ESET, a security firm, a highly malicious Trojan is widely infecting computers across Europe, making them to a strong botnet for the distribution of spam e-mails. The Trojan, which the firm has found to be very active, is dubbed Wind32/Lethic.AA.

While helping to disseminate spam, Lethic is regulated remotely. To creep into an end-user's PC, this malware possibly exploits another malware or an already existing malicious program downloads it onto the infected PC. Further, the botnet amassed with computers infected with this Trojan has the capacity to dispatch approximately 20 MB of junk e-mails per daily.

Reportedly, Win32/Lethic.AA chiefly makes the PC it infects to an extremely strong botnet that distributes spam. It embeds its programming script onto an executable file namely explorer.exe. Consequently, the Trojan becomes nearly invisible and makes its discovery process complicated for the computer operator.

According to the security firm, during mid-March 2010, Trojan Lethic formed the most prevalent security threat all over the globe. It infected the largest number of computers in the Netherlands, accounting for nearly 13% of the entire detections. The countries coming in second and third for the maximum number of infections from the Lethic were Estonia (9%) and Belgium (7%).

Moreover, the Trojan also infected computers in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Slovenia and Portugal, infecting nearly at the rate of 3%. Besides, countries such as Croatia, Slovakia, Russia, Serbia, Greece and the United Kingdom suffer approximately 1% of the entire contaminations. As for Russia, Win32/Lethic.AA is a member of the country's Top 20 e-threats list.

However, the fraction of contaminations from Lethic in Ukraine is quite low.

Moreover, with this Trojan having a high proliferation rate in the European countries, security researchers recommend using up-to-date editions of anti-virus programs and Web-browsers. Additionally, end-users must exercise extreme caution while taking down files online, the researchers suggest.

Meanwhile, according to the researchers, cyber-criminals attacking Europe isn't something new. During 2009, the Conficker virus severely affected the region. During November 2009, Ukraine experienced a particularly high rate of Conficker infection at 24.99%, while Russia similarly had a high 18.39% of infections from the same virus.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

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