Sidebar: Trojan Horse Spreads via Mass Spam Mailing

By Paul Roberts, IDG News Service

July 19, 2004 12:00 PM ET

IDG News Service - Antivirus and e-mail security companies last week sent out warnings about a new Trojan horse program that they claim is being mass distributed on the Internet by means of spam.
The program, called Backdoor-CGT, is a new form of a Trojan horse that's installed when users of Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program follow a Web link embedded in an e-mail message. The Trojan horse was believed to have infected thousands of systems even though antivirus software and up-to-date versions of Outlook are immune to attack, said Maksym Schipka, senior antivirus researcher at MessageLabs Ltd. in Gloucester, England.
MessageLabs received more than 3,600 e-mail messages with links to the Trojan horse during a two-hour period, the result of a spam distribution that was more than 10 times the normal amount for such a program, he said. Trojan horse programs give remote attackers access to or control over machines on which they run, and they often run unnoticed by users or pose as legitimate applications.
The Backdoor-CGT program uses a "multistage" attack to place malicious code on victims' computers. After clicking on an e-mail link embedded in the spam message, victims go to a series of Web sites, each of which carries out one stage in the attack.
The attack takes advantage of a now-patched flaw in Outlook called the "IFRAME" exploit to hide the Web site redirections from the user and silently download and install the Backdoor-CGT program, Schipka said.
McAfee also released an advisory about the new Trojan horse, which is also known as "SS," but rated it a "low" threat to users. McAfee has released software update files to detect the Trojan horse, according to the advisory.

Reprinted with permission from

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