Spammers, always adding to their bag of thug tools, have begun sending spam disguished as legitimate newsletters. To date, the fake newsletters have not accounted for large volumes of spam, but the practice is disturbing because:

1) Recipients might be more likely to open the messages, and,

2) spoofed newsletters might be penalized in any number of ways.

The Storm message has morphed into over 250 variants.

A wide variety of subject lines are being used in the spam campaign, including “You’re so Far Away”, “I Dream of you”, “Dream Date Coupon”, “Together You and I”, “A Bouquet of Love”, “So in Love” and “Cuddle Up”. Attached to the emails are files called ‘flash postcard.exe’ or ‘greetingcard.exe’. When opened, the worm attempts to send itself to other email addresses found on the recipient’s PC, while also attempting to download further malicious code from the internet, designed to take over the computer and use it to send spam on behalf of hacking gangs.

Vint Cerf, “father of the internet,” warned attendees at the world economic forum that botnets could undermine the future of the internet. Cerf estimates that 25% of all PCs currently connected to the internet (about 150 Million) are infected with trojans.

 We have been watching the growth of the Botnet closely over the past several years, and have seen it grow in size and sophistication. One particular Botnet, dubbed Spam Thru, is particulalry sophisticated. It clears other trojans off of computers it has infected and is designed to avoid detection and removal.

Cyber Thugs use Botnets to send spam, steal data and launch denial of service attacks. Essentially, the botnet is a free, illegal, criminal distributed computing network.

An interesting thread in Slashdot examining Blue Tooth Spam.

Business Week reports that China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea are in the top 10 nations for hosting Malware. The United States is number one, at 32%. China is second and hosts 31% of the wordls malware.

According to web and im filtering firm Scan Safe, spyware increased 254% in 2006. However, web based viruses decreased 32% from 2005 levels.

An email worm with the subject lines “230 dead as storm batters Europe,” “U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza,” and “A killer at 11, he’s free at 21”  has spread rapidly across Europe yesterday and today.

Storm Worm is a Trojan horse with an executable file as an attachment. Cybercriminals took advantage of social engineering, using the news of the European storm to get people to open the attached malicious file, which promises more news on the weather emergency. The recipient must open the file for it to execute.

The file creates a back door to a computer that can be exploited later to steal data or to use the computer to post spam.

IT Observer published an article positing the potentially scary future of VOIP Viruses and Malware.