David Sancho

The Computerworld article FBI warns of Valentine’s Day “Storm” said

The Valentine’s Day campaign that the bot-building Storm Trojan horse has been running for weeks is running at such volume that even the FBI issued a warning yesterday.
 
“With the holiday approaching, be on the lookout for spam e-mails spreading the Storm Worm malicious software,” the FBI said in an alert posted to the home page of its Web site yesterday. “The Storm Worm virus has capitalized on various holidays in the last year by sending millions of e-mails advertising an e-card link within the text of the spam e-mail. Valentine’s Day has been identified as the next target.”
 
Actually, the FBI was way behind the ball. For several weeks, security vendors have been predicting that Storm would again use tomorrow’s big day to dupe users into opening attachments or clicking links.
 
Trend Micro senior antivirus researcher David Sancho spelled it out in a post to the company’s blog on Monday. “The spammed e-mail messages are just plain text, but contain links that lead to malicious Web sites displaying one of eight cute Valentine images,” he said. Sancho’s post cycled through the images that Trend Micro captured from the malware-serving sites.
 
“If you run the executable named valentine.exe, your system will join the Storm botnet to start spamming other Internet users,” Sancho concluded. “Not very loving of them.”

David Sancho is Senior Antivirus Engineer at Trend Micro. Trend Micro’s mission is to develop, deliver, and support the most flexible and customizable internet security solutions to address the ever-changing threats on the Web.
 
David researches the latest malware: Storm, Zlob, and others. He has devised a sourcing system to gain intelligence and samples on new threats. Before joining Trend Micro, David was Security Consultant for Burke Formación.
 
David authored The Future of Bot Worms, Rootkits: The new wave of invisible malware is here, Postcards or patches?, Storm Sure Loves Everybody, Unexpected postcards? Beware!!, Fast Flux for Rent, Spam, Spam, Spam and a Big Can of Stration, Changing Browsers In Mid-Stream, Malware as a Service (MaaS) aka RBN, Spam Lures: from Special Deals to Current Affairs, Cyber Gangs Surpass Drug Lords, From Sausage Spoof to Malware, Downloading Video this Season? Beware of Fake Codecs, and Will they target me?
 
Listen to 2007 Threat Landscape: The Evolution of the Threat Landscape and What to Expect in 2007 (Part 1) and 2007 Threat Landscape: The Evolution of the Threat Landscape and What to Expect in 2007 (Part 2). Read MS admits we should use Word in safe mode, Software cracking tools open the door to malware, Battle to beat fake Ebay e-mails, and Safe to gamble? Don’t bet on it.