Social Engineering Helped Spyware Spread

This month's new leader is Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Delf.awg, which appeared on 6th September, when thousands of mail.ru users received a strange email from an unknown girl who offered to share her summer photographs and tales of her holiday.

In spite of the fact that none of the recipients knew the Masha/ Liza/ Lena who was the alleged sender, they still opened the message and clicked on the attachment in the hope of seeing something nice.

Tried and tested social engineering, which worked as well as it always does, and which helped caused one of the biggest outbreaks of Trojan-Spy LdPinch that we've seen over the past few months. LdPinch was the program which Delf.awg installed on the machines of unsuspecting or careless users.

Out of all the unexpected data produced by August, only Backdoor.IRC.Zapchast managed to stand its ground, even rising to second position. This, together with Backdoor.Win32.mIRC-based (a Trojanized mIRC client) in 20th place and Backdoor.Win32.Rbot.gen in 18th place, shows that virus writers are exhibiting renewed interest in creating botnets which can be controlled via IRC.