http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=12148
By Matthew Broersma
Techworld
02 May 2008
Security researchers have discovered a complex spamming scheme that
hijacks users' PCs in order to attempt to send junk mail via university
and military systems.
Researchers at Romania-based BitDefender said the scheme, based on a
backdoor called Edunet, was one of the most complicated and mysterious
they've come across.
"It's not every day that you stumble on the workings of an honest-to-God
hacking ring, let alone one that has a predilection for using military
and university-run mail servers as spam relays,” said Sorin Dudea,
BitDefender's head of anti-virus research, in a statement.
The scam starts with junk emails that offer links to videos. When a user
clicks on the link he is prompted to download a "media player" -
something that should in itself ring alarm bells, since most videos
currently use players embedded in a web page or in the operating system
itself.
The "media player" download is in fact the Edunet backdoor, which
creates a botnet used to attempt to send spam via a list of mail
servers, BitDefender said.
One of the curiosities of Edunet is that these mail servers are mostly
in the .edu and .mil domains. On these servers the botnet looks for open
relays - a type of misconfiguration often used by spammers to disguise
the real origins of the junk mail.
"It would be interesting to identify what, if anything, the institutions
that own the targeted servers have in common," BitDefender's Dudea
stated.
So far, the scheme doesn't seem to have been very effective, since none
of the targeted servers actually host open relays, BitDefender said.
While the list of targets has remained fixed, the botnet takes its
commands from a list of servers that is constantly changing, making it
difficult to pin down where the commands are coming from, the company
said.
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Received on May 05 2008
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