Malware authors declare start of World War III (again)

It beggars belief that anyone would think that they'd first hear of World War III through a spam email. But hackers are relying on such credulous fools in an attempt to spread a new Trojan.

Widely spammed emails with subject lines including "Third World War has begun", "20000 US Soldiers in Iran", and "US Army crossed Iran's borders" link to a website displaying what poses as a video player displaying the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb and text on a supposed US invasion of Iran.

Attempts to play the "clip" on a Windows PC result in infection by the Tibs-UO Trojan .

The tactic is far from the first time hackers used rising tensions between Iran and the West as the theme for malware-based attacks. Iraq's controversial decision to continue building a nuclear plant was used to bait attacks designed to spread a series of Trojans back in 2005, Sophos reports.

VXers, who often use references to news events to fuel attacks, have few bones about making up fake news, the more sensationalist the better. The authors of the Storm worm used the supposed outbreak on World War III as one of many themes in a January 2007 attack.