Storm Worm leverages FBI and Facebook in new attack

A new malware campaign uses the FBI and Facebook as a ruse to trick users into downloading the Storm Worm trojan, US-CERT warned on Tuesday.

The emails arrive with headings such as "FBI may strike Facebook" or "The FBI has a new way of tracking Facebook," according to US-CERT.

According to a Sophos blog post, the email uses both domains and the IP addresses as links that point to the malware executable fbi_facebook.exe.

Overall, this latest Storm attack is similar to others, but with one major distinction, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, told SCMagazineUS.com on Tuesday.

The websites to which the attackers attempt to lead the victims are constantly changing, so the user isn't sure if the email is malicious or real, he said. Once there, the sites attempt to load a bogus news story, which is actually a trojan.

And with this particular campaign, the spammers are feeding on the privacy concerns of Facebook users, said Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs.

“By picking a particularly sensitive area of U.S. policy and combining it with the enormous popularity of Facebook, the spammers have a likelihood of greater success in getting people to open their malicious emails,” he told SCMagazineUS.com. “Storm has recently suffered a large decrease in the size of the botnet, and has been overtaken by Cutwail and Srizbi, which have now been crowned the largest botnets, and so it's not surprising to see these extreme tactics by the owners of Storm.”