Waledac spammers fake ‘bomb blast’ news story

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Security vendors have warned about a new social engineering attack that delivers fake news stories linking to malware.

The new attack tries to persuade users to watch a maliciously crafted fake Reuters video of a ‘bomb attack’ by downloading a version of Flash player, which is in reality malware.

The Waledac trojan had previously targeted users through Valentine’s spam in February.

However, this attack appears to be particularly clever, as the malicious websites have been engineered using geolocation technology to report the location of the incident to correspond with the user’s IP address.

“Don’t be fooled by the location. The site is running a couple of clever scripts," said Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro on the company’s security blog.

“One of them will detect the location of your IP address and vary the location of the disaster accordingly. The other will vary the name of the downloaded file (news.exe, save.exe, run.exe etc.)”

He said it was further evidence that botnet authors were actively filling the void left behind by the fall of the Storm botnet and the McColo server takedown.

Security vendors Sophos and Websense also reported the attacks.

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