Vladimir Putin Death Spam Helps Spread Trojan Horse

Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have warned of a spam campaign that poses as a breaking news report about the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but is really an attempt by hackers to infect computer users with a Trojan horse.

The email claims that the Russian president has died

The email claims that Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, has died.

However, embedded in the HTML email is a hidden script that exploits the ADODB.Stream vulnerability to secretly download the malicious Troj/Dloadr-ZP Trojan horse from a Russian website. The Trojan horse is designed to download further malicious code which could allow remote hackers to gain unauthorized access to the victim's computer.

» infoZine - Kansas City infoZine - 13-07-2006