Spam Mail With Virus Posed As Breaking News

An e-mail containing a virus flashed on the Internet, which announced the death of President Vladimir Putin. The virus, however, has been dissolved, said experts. A program that compromised their computers attacked recipients of the e-mail who opened it. It enabled the virus creators' access to confidential files of the users. Unfortunately, there are no laws, which can punish authors of such impudent action.

On October 25, 2006 two simultaneous things happened. Russian President Vladimir Putin was attending an interview being aired live on TV. At the same time, Internet users received e-mails carrying the title "Attention!!! President of Russia has dead." Like the topic, the message text was also in bad incorrect English. There was a link in the message leading to the BBC news website.

The link was, however, false because it led to a Russian website intended for a construction company selling heating systems for apartments and propagating training seminars. When the recipients opened the link, they unwittingly downloaded a Trojan horse the Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Agent.uj.

Apparently, the sender of the spam was trying to malign the Russian company's name. Users would be mistaken to think that the spam was just an attempt to direct traffic to the products and seminars of the construction company. The fact is hackers were using the means to inject unprotected computers. The infected program allowed the spammers to access passwords and then confidential data and bank Internet bills of the users.

Russia's leading anti-virus software developer, Kaspersky Laboratory, could not tell the exact number of recipients of the spam mail. But it assured that it was possible to cure this kind of viruses.

Security experts suggest that users should apply protective measures on their PCs like security patches, up-to-date anti-virus programs and firewalls. Hackers in the past have used bogus stories with breaking news to lure people to open infected e-mails and they could do it again.

While there is law to prohibit spamming of advertisements, these e-mails are not the advertising type, say legal experts. Genri Reznik, Russia's prominent lawyer said there is no article in the Criminal Code that can prosecute writers of the e-mail.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 11/1/2006