New Spam Claims to Catch Recipient Naked

According to Marshal's TRACE Team, a malicious spam outbreak is being triggered from the Srizbi botnet that has been identified to send the largest amount of spam and to account for 45% of the total spam caught on the Internet.

The Srizbi malware is a well-known spamming Trojan that is also much advanced. As Marshal reported, Srizbi has been most active in pushing out spam containing URLs to Websites that host additional copies of the malware. An analysis of Srizbi indicates that the Trojan is extremely treacherous, running in whole kernel mode, while it bypasses sniffer products and conceals its malicious network activities.

According to Marshal, the spam message contains a link of a supposed naked movie of the reader as it tells the person so after addressing him by his name. The message also suggests the recipient to check the video for himself. So when the recipient clicks the link, his computer becomes infected as the system is added to the Srizbi botnet.

Vice President of Products, Bradley Anstis, Marshal, said that the spammers are clearly aiming to shock gullible recipients into examining this con footage. And as users haste to watch the film, they don't realize that the message actually delivers malware, explained Anstis. SCMagazine published Anstis' statement on April 18, 2008.

According to Anstis, this trick by the spammers is not a new one as it involves a simple yet clever social engineering tactic that effectively draws the user's attention.

According to researchers, Srizbi is currently the largest botnet in the world as it overtakes the already infamous Storm botnet.

Director of malware Research, Joe Stewart at SecureWorks Inc., said that the Srizbi botnet, also known as "Exchanger" and "Cbeplay", has a total number of 315,000 bots that is capable to blast out 60 Billion e-mails per day. ComputerWorld published this on April 9, 2008.

Stewart said that although the Srizbi botnet did not get similar publicity as the Storm, it has evolved around a greater collection of compromised computers. In comparison, the Storm botnet has merely 85,000 hijacked systems of which only 35,000 are arranged to distribute spam.

Related article: New Zealand Releases Code To Reduce Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 4/22/2008