Bin Laden Trojan quickly constrained
A spam e-mail that promises pictures of a captured Osama bin Laden but carries a malicious attachment has failed to spread widely, security experts said Friday.
Millions of copies of various versions of the e-mail were mass-mailed on Thursday, representatives from F-Secure and McAfee said. All versions of the message announced that the al-Qaida leader had been seized and included an attachment called “pics” that, when opened, attempted to download a worm to the victim’s PC, the antivirus companies said.
If the download is successful, the worm will attempt to start propagating by e-mailing itself, said Craig Schmugar, virus research manager at McAfee. It can also set the victim’s computer up to be used as a relay for spam, he said.
Part of one of the spam messages seen by F-Secure read: “Turn on your TV. Osama Bin Laden has been captured. While CNN has no pictures at this point of time, the military channel (PPV) released some pictures. I managed to capture a couple of these pictures off my TV. Ive attached a slideshow containing all the pictures I managed to capture.”