Trojan Attacks Common against Dial-up Users

The security company Kaspersky Lab in the UK is warning computer users that using a dial-up Internet connection to surf the Web could be risky as cyber criminals wait to attack people who might be vulnerable.Webuser.co.uk reported this on February 7, 2008.

The security company said that a certain Trojan dialler was seen to spread most commonly since 2007. This type of malware conducts stealthy actions such as disconnecting a user's computer from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) it uses and reconnecting it to another costly phone number.

Senior Technology Consultant David Emm at Kaspersky Lab said that many users still rely on dial-up to access the Internet and so cyber criminals keep targeting the more vulnerable ones. Webuser.co.uk published Emm's statement on February 7, 2008.

Emm explained how these forms of malware operate stealthily, silently attaching them to the system and making way for the backdoor to let other malicious applications enter the machine and carry out their nasty acts.

Further a report from the Office of National Statistics in September 2007 showed that the total dial-up connections made in U.K. stood at 11.6% indicating that a large number of users in the country were at risk from the dialler Trojan. According to Kaspersky Lab, there are two issues about the Trojan dialler Storm.

First, it deceives the traditional Internet Relay Chat (IRC) command-and-control mechanism to run an off-the-shelf P2P (Peer-to-Peer) technology to monitor systems it hijacks. Moreover, Storm accumulates its bots without the help of a command-and-control mechanism, which has enabled the vast army of zombie PCs to be resilient to conventional efforts for takedown.

Secondly, the Storm creators generate massive variants at dizzying pace to send them out from Internet-connected computers to bot-infected PCs, which constantly keep them ahead of antivirus signatures. The unrecognizable creators are using the same method as that of the Trojan families that conduct a myriad of mass mailings lasting for very short periods.

However, other malware accounted for 6.83% of the total number of malicious code arriving via mail traffic, suggesting that there still exist a good number of various other Trojan and worm families.

Related article: Trojans to Target VoIP in 2006

» SPAMfighter News - 2/16/2008