Old malware threats resurface

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Users have been warned to not open attached zip files in emails claiming to contain naked pictures of Hollywood celebrities.

Hackers are running a massive malicious spam campaign enticing email recipients to open files claiming to have indecent pictures of Nicole Kidman, Milla Jovovich, Angelina Jolie and Natalie Portman. The emails in fact contain a program that installs both the NTRootK-BY rootkit and Agent-FVT trojan.

The email attachment is normally titled "amazing.zip" or "shocking.zip". According to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus firm Sophos this social engineering trick is nothing new but still quite effective.

"It's used so often by cybercriminals that it sometimes feels like it's been around since the days of the silent movies," he said. "However, that hasn't stopped it from being an effective way to fool many people into running code designed to allow hackers to break into computers."

Another computer threat that doesn't seem to be going away any time soon is the Downloader trojan. According to anti-virus company Eset, the malware is number one threat to computer users in its ThreatSense.net chart. The trojan exploits the way Windows handles animated cursors, a flaw that was fixed by Microsoft earlier this year.

However, many computer users still haven't updated their operating systems, so the attack still continues to menace the internet.

"Ani.Gen encompasses the detection of a variety of threats that use the .ANI vulnerability to infect users with other malicious software," said Randy Abrams, Eset's director of education. "One of the contributing factors to its success is that exploit toolkits will attempt a variety of exploits."

He said malformed files using this exploit can easily be sent via spam from large botnets, and such files can be included with software such as "free smileys" and "free cursors". "The effectiveness of the exploit, the variety of vectors in which it can be introduced, and poor patching practices are probably all parts of the reason the threat has stayed on top of the charts," Abrams said.

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