First major worm outbreak of 2007 luring email users via bogus ‘news’ emails
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. – January 19, 2007 – MX Logic, Spam Soap’s Partner in filtering technology, issued a threat alert today on the Storm worm, a new mass-mailing worm that began spreading via email late yesterday in Europe.
The MX Logic® Threat Center first detected the Storm worm was at 7:55 p.m. Mountain Time on Thursday and began blocking it immediately on behalf of 14,000 customers worldwide. As of 2:00 p.m. MT today, the Threat Center had seen over 350,000 email messages infected with the virus and reported that the worm accounted for 1 in 325 emails.
“Since December we have seen multiple instances of attackers using social engineering tactics, like tying into the Christmas holiday or yesterday’s storms in Europe, to entice email users,” said Sam Masiello, director of threat management, MX Logic. “The primary danger of this worm is that once opened, it attaches a Trojan horse on the user’s computer that makes the computer vulnerable to hackers.”
The Storm worm is generally transmitted via emails that appear to announce breaking news stories and which contain subject lines that include:
- 230 dead as storm batters Europe
- A killer at 11, he’s free at 21 and kill again!
- Naked teens attack home director
- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has kicked German Chancellor Angela Merkel
- British Muslims Genocide
The worm-laden emails contain attachments with names that include:
- Read More.exe
- Full Clip.exe
- Full Story.exe
- Full Video.exe
- Video.exe
In the event a user receives an email with one of the headlines listed above in the Subject line, Spam Soap recommends deleting it immediately. If the email has been opened, users are warned not to open the attachment, which would unleash the Trojan horse on the user’s computer.
Spam Soap Multi-Layered, Managed Protection Against Email Viruses and Worms
Spam Soap provides a multi-layered, fully managed virus protection that delivers optimum protection from worms and viruses at the Internet level – before they can enter and damage a customer’s corporate messaging infrastructure.
Spam Soap’s Complete Email Security solutions leverage’s MX Logic’s proprietary WormTraq® worm detection system, which uses sophisticated content behavior analysis to rapidly identify and intercept zero-hour threats – threats that appear before an anti-virus signature is developed to detect them. Spam Soap also incorporates virus protection from three leading anti-virus engines – Authentium®, McAfee® and Sophos®—which are updated every five minutes to ensure the most current virus and worm protection.
Spam Soap’s multi-layered virus and worm protection frees internal corporate IT resources from managing timely signature updates by shifting the burden of threat management away from the enterprise to Spam Soap. Spam Soap’s Complete Email Security solutions also allow IT administrators the ability to respond to infected email by choosing to have viruses stripped from incoming email, quarantining infected messages for review, or blocking infected email outright.
Spam Soap is one of MX Logic’s largest and most trusted Partners. Clients of Spam Soap enjoy the filtering sophistication and easy administration of MX Logic with the small-business service and support that Spam Soap has always delivered.