Fresh Malware Hides Behind Sudoku Puzzle on Excel: Sophos

SophosLabs is warning about a Sudoku generator designed on Microsoft's Excel program, which's duping victims into executing malicious software.

Evidently, for computing instructions, issued in a series, for a programmer, in the form of one lone statement, the use of macros is crucial. For instance, mouse or keyboard macros let mouse/keystroke serial acts towards getting converted into shorter instructions.

Long ago during 1990s, cyber-criminals chose macros as their attack tool. But Microsoft countered it via automating macro deactivation, doing everything except dousing the macro-based malicious e-threat.

Security Expert Richard Wang at Sophos in a blog posting stated that anybody wishing for issuing and solving a puzzle must activate macros. However, there were more uses to macros, while the trick within the current attack was pretty uncomplicated i.e. enabling macros for generating the Sudoku riddle, he wrote. Nakedsecurity.sophos.com published this dated December 19, 2012.

Furthermore as per Wang, the cyber-criminals were as well helping the riddle-solvers with easy directions regarding activating of the macros. Those directions were first clicking the button for "options" second, highlighting "Enable this content" and third pressing on "OK."

Elsewhere Wang stated that if the user was able to circumvent the security defenses he could freely set towards solving the puzzle. But sadly, as the person got engrossed with the Sudoku, out of his view worked the malware, busy installing itself onto the attacked computer. Itworldcanada.com published this dated December 19, 2012.

And soon as the malware got planted it would garner system info via utilizing commands -"ipconfig," "systeminfo" as well as "tasklist." Moreover, information that got collected related to network, operating systems, hardware, patches, programs as well as services, which was subsequently encrypted followed with dispatched to one id namely aol.com.

Sophos' detection tools spotted the malevolent Excel document as WM97/ExeDrop-G as well as identified the malware as Troj/DwnLdr-KLI.

It's advisable that Sudoku players remain vigilant of the above kind of puzzle generators through spreadsheets. Many such software programs are there online therefore, it's important that they be downloaded solely from authorized sites. Additionally, it's important to maintain anti-virus applications up-to-date on users' computers to ward off the infections.

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» SPAMfighter News - 12/28/2012