New pest: Crowt-A worm

Article from Sydney Morning Herald,Australia

Worm writers have adopted a new social engineering stunt, with the latest worm targeting Windows systems posing as breaking news headlines, the anti-virus company Sophos says.

The worm, which Sophos has dubbed Crowt-A, adopts subject lines, content and attachment names from headlines which it has collected in real-time from CNN.

Like countless other worms, it attempts to send itself by email to addresses found on infected computers.

Sophos said the subject line and attachment had the same name, but this kept changing to the front-page headline on the CNN news site.

The body copy was also taken from CNN's site, and hence the recipient could be fooled into thinking he or she was reading a bonafide newsletter.

The worm also installs a backdoor trojan which tries to log keystrokes and send them to a remote user.

The worm is not present in significant numbers to cause any alarm, Sophos said.