Virus exploits people's fears

December 26, 2003

Another Trojan that uses so called social engineering technique to infect computers has been making its rounds amongst Malaysian surfers.

The deceptive e-mail message preys on people's fear of terrorism activates malicious Backdoor.Tofger derivative code was first received on 20th of December by an anonymous reader who then alerted In.Tech and Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team.

Bearing an "urgent message for all Malaysians" and information "from an anonymous source within the Government", the e-mail claims the Government has knowledge of "at least 5 planned acts of terrorism, and provisional places and times of carrying out these acts."

It adds the so-called source leaked the information "to minimize the quantity of victims."

The message then instructs those who "think of the future of the relatives" to click on an embedded link that "will take them to a website providing information, which probably will rescue your life."

According to the Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team, activating the link would execute a program that copies three files containing malicious code that attempts to connect to three specific Internet hosts, and adds a new key to the victim's computer registry.

Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team said the hosts could have been readily compromised to be used as launching pads for other malicious activities and notified the system administrators of the hosts concerned about the problem.