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SANS ISC InfoSec Forums

Looks like Storm moved to a new mutation. The e-mails are now inviting users to become members in various "clubs". Here is a sample I just got:

Subject: Login Information

Dear Member,

Are you ready to have fun at CoolPics.

Account Number: 73422529174753
Your Temp. Login ID: user3559
Temorary Password: jz438

Please Change your login and change your Login Information.

This link will allow you to securely change your login info: http://a.b.c.d/

Thank You,
New Member Technical Support
CoolPics

I have seen about a dozen different once so far. They are all "confirmations" in this style to various web sites. The web page offers again an "applet.exe" for download.

In short: We don't need to enumerate variants of the e-mail message. If you are brave and know what you are doing, download the applet.exe and try to reverse it (not easy typically). Thunderbird warned me that the link is a scam. (I think it does so for all numeric IP links).

My copy of applet.exe was about 114 kB large. While many AV scanners detect it as "evil" based on heuristic signatures, some well known scanners don't (maybe Virustotal is running them without heuristic turned on, or they just don't do it)

 IMHO: this is a lost cause. People are either infected or they know how to protect themselves.

(From virustotal.com)

File applet.exe received on 08.21.2007 05:21:50 (CET)
Current status: Loading ... queued waiting scanning finished NOT FOUND STOPPED

(I replaced the numeric IP address with 'a.b.c.d')