"Storm Worm" Hits Computers Worldwide

January 20, 2007

While most of us were glued to our TV sets, eagerly watching what's happening next on "Big Brother", there was someone somewhere who cared quite a damn about it and was rather engaged in doing something else.

Data security company F-Secure has issued a warning about a new computer virus dubbed "The Storm Worm" that has started circulating worldwide from Thursday and has infact hit several parts of Europe aswell.

According to F-Secure, the significant network attack was launched worldwide in the wee hours of Thursday morning (GMT) using news of a European storm as the hook. The Storm virus was distributed in messages with subject line of "230 dead as storm batters Europe." When the user opens a linked attachment, the Storm virus is let loose, and attacks the computer.

Apart from the headline "230 dead as storm batters Europe" the spam mail uses a number of other challenging headlines. Attachments may be of the following filenames: "Full Clip.exe"; "Full Story.exe"; "Read More.exe" and 'Video.exe."

Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer at F-Secure said: "Trojan assaults of this scale are an unfortunate and increasingly common event. What is significant here though is the timely nature of this assault in relation to the European storm. Malware gangs are clearly using every technique and even tragedies like these to gain access to vulnerable machines."

Updated anti-virus software offers protection against the "Storm Worm" virus, which has already been sent to hundreds of thousands of e-mails around the world.

Source: Tech Shout!