It’s crazy to hear about the things this worm is doing, even though various patches have been developed to mitigate (or at least minimize) the threat.  While this worm may be dying down, it is definitely not going without a fight.  It recently delivered 15 million mp3-oriented emails to unsuspecting recipients about buying a specific stock, in hopes to make its value go up to sell.  One thing that I would be curious to know about is how many people actually act on these anonymous messages.  I hope not too many…

San Francisco (IDGNS) - The Storm Worm botnet network may be shrinking in size, but it has managed to send out 15 million of those annoying audio spam messages in October, according to anti-spam vendor MessageLabs.

It’s hard to believe that the Storm messages were effective. Recipients had to first click on an attachment — usually given a misleading name such as beatles.mp3 or Britney.mp3 — to hear the stock pitch, which featured a warbly robotic woman advising people to invest in online car seller, Exit Only.

This kind of scam, called “pump and dump,” tries to nudge up the price of penny stocks by a cent or two, giving the spammers a way to make a quick buck by selling the stock before it crashes. Spammers have been delivering their messages in different formats, including PDF and Excel files, over the past few years as part of a cat-and-mouse game with spam blockers. This move to MP3 spam is the latest development in this battle, observers say.[more]

Tags: Spam