Games Concealing Viruses & Trojans

The techniques of social engineering revolves around basic and the most simple measures like gossip and entertainment for attracting more customers for running deadly codes on their PC. But from the last few weeks, there have been cases of offering video games to victimize the users.

In the last week of July 2007, the latest run of 'Storm Worm' keeps appearing in the inboxes and uses the lucrative offer of video games carrying a catchy subject like 'a funny flash game'.

Once a computer system is infected, this 'Storm Worm' requires a sophisticated chain of installed code, but the initial infections largely depend on the devices of social engineering to encourage the user to operate the first set of malcode. Previously, they have took the help of attention seeking news pieces which gives the attacks their popular name and greeting cards acknowledging several events- ESET's Randy Abrams added the new barrage on his crusade against the concept of e-card on the ESET blog.

Bojan Zdrnja, a handler with the Sans Institute's Internet Storm Centre (ISC), said that the innovation is a clear indication of the development of the malware authors and of how common virtualization is coming forth, as per the news by PC World on July 27, 2007.

Coupled with this technique of carrying messages like 'happy life', there is another trend of carrying cool screensavers followed with some cool messages of 'life is beautiful' and 'joy of life' spammers brought forth last week. Obviously, these fake screensavers are Trojan with the components of rootkit.

Sophos has also uncovered recently that Nintendo's popular game 'Mario' has become the latest source for spreading malware. The mass mailer, termed as 'W32/Romario', includes a playable Mario game through which it gets installed in the system, collects email addresses for spreading to external drives under the banner of range of games.

Senior techie at security firm Sophos, Graham Cluley, calls these kinds of games stealth-like because fans of these games can click on the file and start playing without sensing any danger for viruses, as per the reports of Absolute gadget on July 30, 2007.

Related article: Gang of 23 Turkish-Russian Hackers Rob Users’ Bank Accounts

» SPAMfighter News - 8/16/2007