A new round of greeting card spam that draws users to attack sites relies on a sophisticated multi-pronged, multi-exploit strike force to infect machines, security professionals said recently.
Captured samples of the spam have all borne the same subject line – “You’ve received a postcard from a family member!” – and contain links to a malicious Web site, where JavaScript determines whether or not the victim’s browser has scripting enabled.
“If JavaScript is disabled, then they provide you a handy link to click on to exploit yourself,” said an alert posted by SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center (ISC). Browsers with JavaScript enabled are simply fed a two-part package of downloader and malware.
The greeting card gambit tries a trio of exploits. The first exploit is against a QuickTime vulnerability, the second is an attack on the popular WinZip compression utility and the third, dubbed “the Hail Mary” by ISC, is an exploit for the WebViewFolderIcon vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft patched last October.
ISC said several antivirus vendors had tentatively pegged the executable malware – the file offered to users whose browsers have JavaScript disabled – as a variation of the Storm Trojan, an aggressive piece of malware that has been hijacking computers to serve as attacker bots since early this year. 075896
