The spammer Christmas

Filed in archive Spam News on December 27, 2006

Sometimes spammers make me sicker than usual, and this Christmas was no exception. As Computerworld reported, spammers gave their best to all computer users all over America with a very special Christmas greeting: 'Merry Christmas to our hero sons and daughters' spam e-mail, hiding a vicious Trojan ready to be installed:

"In an e-mail warning, iDefense said that the e-mail with the subject "Merry Christmas to our hero sons and daughters!" and the attachment Christmas+Blessing-4.ppt "silently installs a backdoor Trojan horse on vulnerable computers." This version of the Hupigon (sometimes also called Hupigeon) Trojan installs two files on a compromised system, according to Ken Dunham, director of iDefense's Rapid Respones Team: msupdate.dll (18,507 bytes) and sdfsc.dll (3 bytes)"

This festive season you have many things to be grateful for, especially if you opened the attachment in the 'Marry Christmas' e-mail, so I guess you are writing a special Thank You note to the Microsoft team thanking them for making bulletproof and secure software such as PowerPoint.

Did I forget to mention that attachments in unsolicited e-mails should not be opened? My geek friend says that even the most sophisticated anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall programs can't compete with human stupidity.