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Storm is back in the festive season spreading some xmas and new year love. They even have a new year greeting site ready for spreading New Year related Storm Worm variants.

Social Engineering again, people are always more susceptible during holidays, I guess they are happy and less paranoid.

The Storm Worm gang are spreading seasonal ill-will. Security watchers have spotted New Year greeting spam runs that attempt to direct recipients to a malicious web site called uhavepostcard.com.

Anti-virus firm F-Secure warns that although the site remains free of exploits (for now) the spam run is likely to be a prelude for a New Year’s Eve-themed Storm Worm attack.

Things are getting tricky again, these Storm guys are really pushing the envelope for global domination with their nasty botnet, I guess there really is a lot of money in the business.

Malware miscreants are making early preparations for the New Year after they left it too late for Christmas, only striking on Christmas Eve. A widely-circulated email first distributed on December 24 pointed to a website containing a malicious Santa Claus-themed striptease.

The emails, which have varied subject lines including “Your Secret Santa”, “Santa Said, HO HO HO”, “Warm Up this Christmas” and “Mrs. Clause Is Out Tonight!” attempt to entice prospective marks into visiting a website containing images of scantily clad young women in a Santa suits. The images and “Download for free now!” button both linked to a variant of the Storm Worm, anti-virus firm Sophos reports.

So make sure you tell people, be careful about greeting cards from unknown addresses. And well let’s face it, be careful about anything from any address, don’t simply run executables you didn’t request and don’t go to dodgy sites – stick to Yahoo! Hallmark and other well known e-card providers.

You can read more on SANS ISC about Storm here.

Source: The Register