Beijing.Exe Storm Outbreak
June 26th, 2008
A new spam outbreak attributed to the Storm Botnet has been hitting the Internet since Jun 18, 2008. The message warns of earthquakes hitting well known sites around the world causing significant destruction and loss of life and is being distributed from IP addresses hosted around the world. This site claims a quake measured in at 9.0 on the Richter scale has caused casualties and threatens the preparations for the upcoming Olympics hosted in China. The page contains links to a supposed video that actually downloads the Storm worm.
Variants of the attack mention similar incidents at the Eiffel Tower in France, Giza pyramids in Egypt and Stonehenge in UK as the baits in spam emails during the first days of its outbreak.
These types of spam messages are reminiscent of previous Storm attacks that use timely events such as Holidays (Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day) or the Super Bowl to lure mail recipients to act.
The daily volume of these spam emails analyzed by Secure Computing TrustedSource Reputation System globally increased 10 fold from June 18 to June 24. Spam volume has seen more than a 100% increase from June 2007, although down from the record highs seen in March of this year. New web sites are popping up continuously around the world. Secure Computing has already seen the attack hosted on over 100,000 web sites.
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