Fergie's Tech Blog

Stration: Tricky New Malware Challenges Vendors

Jeremy Kirk writes on InfoWorld:

A tricky malicious program has become more prevalent in spam, but experts don't know what its creators plan to do with it.

Many vendors are rating the malware -- called "Warezov," "Stration" and "Stratio" -- as a low risk. But they also say that it is tricky to deal with.

The malware is a mass-mailing worm that affects machines running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows OS. When the malware infects a computer -- usually after the user has opened an attachment containing the worm in a spam e-mail -- it sends itself out again to other e-mail addresses found on the computer. The code is then capable of downloading new versions of itself as frequently as every 30 minutes from a batch of Web sites, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure Corp., a security company in Helsinki.

Those new versions are created by a program on a server controlled by the hacker, Hypponen said.

posted by Fergie @ 10/30/2006 10:22:00 AM