Storm Trojan Variant Spreading Through Email and Web Channels

A new variant of the "Storm" Trojan is injecting its come-on into blogs, Web-based message forums and Webmail as part of an effort to spread itself to an ever-widening net of PCs, according to a security researcher.

Dmitri Alperovitch, principal research scientist at Secure Computing, said Tuesday that the Trojan best known as the "Storm worm" but also pegged as "Peacomm" and half a dozen other names by antivirus vendors -- is using a novel approach to spread. "This is a really neat twist, through the Web channel," said Alperovitch.

An initial infection is still carried out via e-mail, which touts a link that when clicked downloads a number of malware components to a victimized machine. Once on a PC, however, the malicious code injects itself into the network stack as a rootkit and analyzes all outbound Web traffic.

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