Experts at Sophos have warned of a Trojan horse that has been spammed out to email addresses disguised as a warning about a university rapist.
The Troj/Stinx-N Trojan horse spams out email messages, which can have a subject line from "CCTV still of Rapist", "Do you recognise this person?", or "Campus Student Raped" contain the following message:
"Hello,
During the early morning of January 25 2006, a campus student was the victim of a horrific sexual assault within college grounds. Eyewitnesses report a tall black man in grey pants running away from the scene. Campus CCTV has caught this man on camera and are looking for ways to identify him. If anyone recognises the attached picture could they inform administraion immediatly
Regards,
Robert Atkins
Campus Administration"
Attached files containing the Trojan horse include "Suspects Photo.exe", "suspect image.exe", "CCTVstill.exe", "CCTV-footage.exe", and "suspicious photo.exe". Sophos has received reports of the Trojan horse being spammed to email addresses at universities in North America and the United Kingdom, but warns that the hackers may not limit themselves to academic email addresses.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos said,
"Launching the attached file will not show you a CCTV picture of a rapist, but instead punch a hole in the security of your PC. Hackers are reaching an all time low with this attempt to encourage kind well-meaning people into opening their malicious file. Anyone unfortunate enough to run this program is running the risk of allowing hackers to gain access to their computer to spy, steal and cause havoc. If you ever doubted that the minds behind viruses, worms and Trojan horses were sick and twisted, here's the proof," continued Cluley. "Keeping anti-virus software up-to-date is a must. Regular anti-virus updates combined with sensible safe computing policies and strong email policy at the gateway reduces the risk of threats like this to a minimum."
The Troj/Stinx-N Trojan horse was first discovered at 16:32 GMT on 27 January 2006.
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