The security company said that PCs infected by the Storm Trojan, which has made several appearances this year and was seen as recently as yesterday, have been drawn into a gigantic spam-producing network, or botnet.

The majority of the spam emails being sent by the storm botnet are offering male enlargement drugs, replica watches and sexually explicit material.

The Storm Trojan first appeared more than a year ago and takes its name from one attack it made, disguised in emails with subject lines relating to a period of extreme weather in Europe.

It often reappears at significant dates such as New Year or Valentine's Day.

"Storm celebrated its first birthday at the start of the year and commemorated the anniversary with a significant run of nostalgic spam. More than 78 per cent of the spam it spewed out this quarter was either focused on male enlargement drugs, replica watches or spam of a sexual nature," said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst at MessageLabs.

However, the botnet can also be used to distribute malware on a large scale as well.

"Storm's focus on spam seems to be just the tip of the iceberg as emails containing malware and phishing attacks from the Storm botnet are now growing in numbers," Sunner said.

www.messagelabs.com

Back to index