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Stinx-N Trojan: College Rapist Emails
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-01-30
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Acts like rape are tragic enough without some second-rate hacker trying to make things worse. A new Trojan, Troj/Stinx-N, is floating around with subject lines talking about university rapists.
According to Sophos' new bulletin, the subject lines including things like "Do you recognized this person?" or "Campus Student Raped" or even "CCTV still of Rapist." This is the message in the emails:
Hello,
During the early morning of January 25 2006, a campus student was the victim of a horrific sexual assault within college grounds. Eyewitnesses report a tall black man in grey pants running away from the scene. Campus CCTV has caught this man on camera and are looking for ways to identify him. If anyone recognises the attached picture could they inform administraion immediatly
Regards,
Robert Atkins
Campus Administration
Attached files containing the Trojan horse include "Suspects Photo.exe", "suspect image.exe", "CCTVstill.exe", "CCTV-footage.exe", and "suspicious photo.exe"
"Launching the attached file will not show you a CCTV picture of a rapist, but instead punch a hole in the security of your PC," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "Hackers are reaching an all time low with this attempt to encourage kind well-meaning people into opening their malicious file. Anyone unfortunate enough to run this program is running the risk of allowing hackers to gain access to their computer to spy, steal and cause havoc."
Sophos said they've received reports of the Trojan being spammed at university email addys in North America and the United Kingdom. They stress though this may not be limited to universities though.
"If you ever doubted that the minds behind viruses, worms and Trojan horses were sick and twisted, here's the proof," continued Cluley. "Keeping anti-virus software up-to-date is a must. Regular anti-virus updates combined with sensible safe computing policies and strong email policy at the gateway reduces the risk of threats like this to a minimum."
As always, the best way to avoid the problem is make sure the security software is up to date and don't open files from people you don't know. Sometimes even then, don't open them.
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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