Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global
network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have warned
users about a Trojan horse that poses as a wallchart for the soccer
World Cup tournament due to take place in Germany this summer.
The Troj/Haxdoor-IN Trojan
horse has been spammed out to computer users via a link in a
message offering a free wallchart for fans who wish to follow their
favorite teams in the international football tournament. If PC
users are tempted into running the malicious program they risk
allowing hackers to gain access to their computer for criminal
ends.
All examples of the emails seen so far have been in the German
language, but there is no reason to believe that hackers will not
switch to using other languages to increase their pool of potential
victims.
A typical example of the message reads as follows:
The emails claim to offer a World Cup
wallchart.
"The World Cup is one of the biggest sporting events of the
year, and fans all over the globe will be following their national
team avidly," said Graham Cluley, senior
technology consultant for Sophos. "Malware authors are playing on
interest in the tournament to try and infect as many people as
possible, in an attempt to seize control, steal from, and spy on
innocent users' computers."
Sophos's proactive technology was capable of detecting the
Trojan horse (naming it as Troj/Haxdor-Fam), defending customers'
computers without requiring an update.
Sophos experts report that this is not the first time that
hackers have taken advantage of the World Cup competition.
A year ago, the Sober-N worm offered
tickets to the tournament in an attempt to entrap unprotected
users.
In 2002, the VBS/Chick-F
virus tried to exploit workers desperate to find out the latest
scores from the World Cup in S Korea/Japan.
In 1998, in the run-up to the World cup competition in France,
another
football-inspired virus asked infected victims to gamble on who
the winner might be, and if the user did not choose the right team
triggered a warhead which was capable of wiping all the data off
the hard drive.
"It would be no surprise at all if more malware was written as
the World Cup rapidly approaches," continued Cluley. "Everyone
should be careful not to fall foul of football-related viruses and
Trojan horses, as well as soccer-related spam and lottery
scams."
Companies are recommended to protect their email with a consolidated solution to thwart the virus, spyware
and spam threats and secure their desktops and servers with
automatically updated anti-virus protection.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.