Koobface Trojan Soaring Massively

German security vendor 'eleven' recently published a report naming 'E-mail Security Report October 2010'. According to this report, around 80 % of the malware infected e-mails that were reported during September 2010, enclosed variants of the Koobface Trojan aka TR.Crypt.ZPACK.Gen.

This report states that the Koobface (computer Trojan), which initially originated on the social networking website Facebook, has not only propagated to other mediums, but has become one of the most prevalent e-mail worms.

Malware writers were found to be highly innovative in formulating tricks to attract users into opening malware infected links or attachments. New tricks included tax assessment orders, resumes, and messages regarding successfully sent faxes. Besides, the conventional tricks like delivery confirmations from renowned courier companies were prevalent like before.

Apart from the above mentioned findings, this latest report notes that the amount of spam e-mails considerably increased in September 2010 and mentions three particular trends.

The first trend refers to spam e-mails that enclose an HTML attachment, which when opened triggers a JavaScript that directs the victim to the infected web page. As a matter of fact, apart from phishing and spamming, this technique is also used for propagating malware nowadays.

According to eleven, the second trick was the appearance of politically provoked spam campaigns referring to the latest debate moving around controversial statements by Thilo Sarrazin, ex- Bundesbank Executive Board member. These spam e-mails came with subject lines like "Everyone knows Sarrazin's right!" and showed receivers like "Friends of Sarrazin" or "Sarrazin Fan Club".

The third trend was the emergence of various series of spam that did not have advertising messages. Rather, they enclosed only three four lines of randomly produced text and no advertising content, images, video clips, attachments or links. Hence, it is not possible to attribute to these kind of spam e-mails for any purpose of differentiating, eleven notes in its report.

Furthermore, according to eleven's new report developments were seen in the sources of the spam. The USA accounted for the top spam source with a rate of 9.3%, followed by Brazil with 8.7%, and India with 8.4%. With a spam rate of 4% Germany declined to the eighth slot, whereas, Russia (5%) managed to grab its place among the top five spam sources for the first time in 2010.

Related article: Koobface Worm Still Active on Facebook Through Hacked Accounts

» SPAMfighter News - 10/26/2010