HEADS UP >> Fake news headlines are the latest spam Storm ... USA TODAY July 21, 2008

July 21, 2008

Storm

USA TODAY

July 21, 2008 Be careful when you open your email at work today. Over the

weekend, your inbox may have become inundated with messages carrying links to

news stories with lurid headlines about

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, McCain, Britney Spears and other celebs.

Don't even think about clicking on the link. If you do, you will instantly join

millions of others duped over the past 18 months into turning over your PC to

the operators of the Storm botnet. Your PC

will then be used to spread fraud spam; you'll help these guys sell fake drugs and

carry out pump-and-dump stock market scams.

For good measure, the Storm gang will gleefully harvest all of your usernames,

passwords, credit card numbers, Social Security number -- any sensitive

data you type into web page forms. Your personal data will be sold to the

highest bidder in a thriving, eBay-like underground market. And

to add salt to your wounds, the only way to get Storm off your PC is by reinstalling a fresh copy of your Windows

operating system. Tapping people's morbid curiosity isn't terribly clever. The Storm

gang first began using lurid headlines -- about weather events -- way back in January 2007.

However, these crooks have demonstrated a superior ability to reduce the best

firewalls and spam blockers corporations can buy into Swiss cheese, says SecureWorks

researcher Don . They do it with state-of-the-art "packing"

technology that allows them to churn out new variants of their malicious code

magnitudes of order faster than anti virus companies can detect and block them,

told me. A handful of rival crime rings -- with names like Rustock, Bobax and SriZbi

-- operate equally sophisticated and persistent spamming botnets, says

. Researchers from San , Calif.-based security firm Finjan

recently spent 18 months undercover prowling around criminal forums and chat

rooms to document the business models used by the top cyber crime groups.

Finjan CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak says the elite botnet spamming rings function as

part of a "major shadow economy with an organizational structure

that closely mimics the real business world." Strict hierarchies prevail.

Duties are clearly delineated. And compensation is tied directly to rank, very

much like the military and the mafia, Ben-Itzhak told me. "Businesses today are even more vulnerable to cybercrime

attacks, especially considering the maturity of the cybercrime market and its

well-structured cybercrime organizations,” says Ben-Itzhak. By Byron Acohido

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