Super Wednesday

Whilst the masses stay vigilant to “love” attacks [1][2][3][4] in the run-up to Valentine’s Day (tomorrow, don’t forget!), others, including McAfee Avert Labs, are wary of further hybrid spam and malware attacks. This morning we received thousands upon thousands of “Google Ad link” samples via our anti-malware and anti-spam automation systems.

A topical social-engineering trick highlights the race to the White House [5] for the Hillary Clintons and Barack Obamas of the world. It’s actually surprising we didn’t see more of this attack yesterday–the week’s anniversary of Super Tuesday [6].

The spam email (example below) contains a link (hidden by HTML [7]) that points to Google’s page-ad service passing another URL–a malicious one–which effectively redirects your browser to a site hosting a protectively detected Downloader.gen.a [8] sample. The site used in this attack is suspected to be linked to the notorious Russian Business Network (RBN) [9].

Other examples of this spam included some of the following subjects:

• Hillary Clinton Full Video !!!
• Interesting dvd with Beyonce + 4 asiatic lovers!
• Interesting dvd with Jennifer Lopez + 5 english boys!
• Interesting mp3 with Beyonce + 5 portuguese horse!
• Interesting photo with Mylene Farmer + 6 black stallions!
• Interesting video with Keira Knightley + 2 black dogs!
• Keen melody with Christina Aguilera + 4 english boys!
• Keen photo with Britney Spears + 4 asiatic stallions!
• Kick-up mp3 with Christina Aguilera + 5 irish mans!
• New melody with Kylie Minogue + 3 spain dogs!
• New presentation with Mylene Farmer + 6 portuguese lesbians!
• Part of presentation with Jessica Parker + 6 black dogs!
• Shocking photo with Jessica Parker + 3 italian horse!
• Stunning presentation with Beyonce + 3 black stallions!

We urge you to be vigilant and keep your anti-spam and anti-malware protection up to date. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it normally is.

[1] : http://www.publicopiniononline.com/localnews/ci_8249998
[2] : http://blogs.knoxnews.com/knx/silence/archives/2008/02/valentines_day.shtml
[3] : http://www.nbc13.com/gulfcoastwest/vtm/news.apx.-content-articles-VTM-2008-02-13-0006.html
[4] : http://press-releases.techwhack.com/16498/microworld-technologies
[5] : http://www.independent.co.uk/news/in-the-news/race-for-whitehouse
[6] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday
[7] : http://www.labs.com/research/blog/index.php/2007/08/20/the-risks-of-html-formatted-e-mails
[8] : http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_142821.htm
[9] : http://www.securecomputing.net.au/news/69637,britney-paris-used-as-hook-in-new-spam-botnet.aspx