A fresh round of spam with a password-stealing Trojan horse detected this week uses a German-language pitch, saying the malicious attachment is an official Microsoft Windows update.
The attached malware, called "Trojan-PSW.Win32.Sinowal.u" by antivirus software developer Kaspersky Lab, is a next-generation Trojan that's on the rise, said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior research engineer with the company. The Sinowal family of malware was first detected in December, and first seeded on malicious Web sites.
If a user visited the site and did not have a properly patched browser, the software would install itself, allowing it to harvest login and password information for some European banks' Web sites, Schouwenberg said. The Sinowal family of malware may have been created in Russia, since the malware code contains some Russian, he said.
The latest spam messages have a ".de" e-mail address. Rather depending on a browser exploit to install itself, the latest version of Sinowal tries to trick users into installing it. The message, written in German, claims that a new worm is on the loose, and that the recipient should run the attached file to protect their system.
