Happy New Year Worm Actually Meant To Pull Up Stocks

Panda Software has discovered that the Happy New Year worm was contained in emails having Nuwar.B, the latest variant of the Nuwar worms. This harmful code makes use of the New Year greetings as a device in intrude into computers. The code is intended more to hike up certain stock prices rather than to cause serious damage to computers.

Nuwar.B comes as an e-mail message with "Happy New Year!" in the subject line. There is no message text instead an attachment is enclosed with the name postcard.exe. This harbors the worm. In order to fool the recipient, the mail fakes the sender's address, appearing to originate from different users. The purpose of the worm has become more apparent with the passage of time. Panda Software says that the worm was designed to control stocks by making recipients rush towards purchasing shares in specific companies.

If the targeted receiver opens the attached file, Nuwar.B replicates itself on the system and installs a copy of the Spammer.EN Trojan. The Trojan then links to some email servers and dispatches spam to the addresses it sees in the infected system. This spam contains promotional material for certain stocks in order to make people buy them and quickly shoot up their prices.

The Director of the malware Detection Department in Panda Software, Mikel Perez, believes that this is just another ruse in the world of cyber crime. Here we notice how an email worm is employed to obtain pecuniary gain. He added that the worm probably belonged to a criminal who had purchased stocks low and wished to raise their price by means of the Nuwar.B worm, thus securing enormous advantages. All indications point to the fact that the designer(s) of the worm sent it out in the form of spam that would exploit specific email servers in order to propagate as rapidly as possible.

Security experts recommend that users install effective anti-virus and anti-spam ware with routine updates if they are to shield themselves from being the targets of such scams.

Related article: Heavy Spamming of PDF Malware in October

» SPAMfighter News - 1/8/2007