Fake Storm Worm blast claims World War III is here

Fresh off a July 4 Storm Worm spam surge, the resilient yet predictable botnet is back -- this time spreading bogus emails that the United States and Iran are at war.

The latest wave is similar to the weekend's Independence Day-themed spam, according to internet security firm Websense. Messages arrive that contain a brief amount of text, which tries to persuade unsuspecting recipients to visit a bogus website.

In this case, the website tries to dupe people to click on a video that claims to show the "first minutes of the beginning of World War III." If opened, the video may run a malicious executable.

The Storm Worm, which first appeared in early 2007, has been capitalizing on holidays and popular news ever since.

Kevin Liston, an incident handler at the all-volunteer SANS Internet Storm Center, said in a recent blog post that businesses should, by now, be able to stave off Storm-related attacks.

"I don't consider these Storm botnet waves to be so much of a threat," he said. "I consider them like an EICAR (anti-virus test file) for an organization's incident response process. If your security policies and incident response procedures are having difficulty with this kind of event, they both need some assistance and retooling."

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