Spam Volume Triples In A Week

Marshal’s TRACE Team is reporting that the volume of malware infected spam has tripled in the past week. This is largely due to the Srizbi botnet, which is currently responsible for 46% of all spam traffic. The type of spam it’s sending isn’t selling anything. It’s simply trying to recruit more machines for its botnet by tricking recipients into downloading malware.

           “The Srizbi botnet is behind much of this increase in malicious spam,” said Phil Hay, lead threat analyst with Marshal’s TRACE team. “Srizbi’s criminal controllers are currently on a major expansion drive. The more computers infected by Srizbi bots the more money they can make.”

Right now there are two types of malicious spam being sent. The first, which researchers call the “stupid theme” delivers a message telling the recipient they look stupid in a video and include a link to it. Anyone following the link will have malware downloaded on to their computer. The second type attempts to exploit the popular Classmates.com service.

It tells the recipient they have a new message waiting for them on the service and provide a link. The link redirects to a fake Classmates.com page and prompted to download an update to their Flash player…the “update” is actually malware.

          “We see Srizbi as one of the biggest threats to Internet users today,” said Hay. “We are trying to work with other security researchers to raise the profile of Srizbi and the threat it represents. In contrast, the Storm botnet receives more research and media attention, yet its impact is now bordering on insignificant. When Storm became a high-profile target, Microsoft had great success in removing it from thousands of infected PCs with their Malicious Software Removal Tool. Now, Srizbi needs to become a similar priority for security researchers.”

          “In the meantime, users should be wary of emails that make personal offers such as online friend connections or include inflammatory personalised subjects such as ‘you look stupid in this video,’ particularly if they don’t recognise the sender,” he said.

Common sense rules apply here…don’t click on links in emails, especially those from people you don’t know-and to check out a link, let your mouse pointer hover over it. The actual site it directs to will be shown clearly at the bottom. So far hackers and scammers haven’t figured out how to get around that, so they rely on people’s ignorance to get their malware payload delivered. Don’t fall for it!