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Storm Hits Blogger

And when we thought it the worst has passed.

The ubiquitous Storm Trojan has found a new home ? on spam blog sites in Google’s Blogger network

Careful whose blog you’re reading these days: Researchers have discovered the Storm Trojan nestled in hundreds of blog sites in Google’s Blogger network.

This Storm infection is not simple comment spam, where spammers post their junk messages and malware as blog comments. “These are blogs that post spam,” says Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, who has been studying the posts. He says he hasn’t seen any legitimate blogs bites being hacked and sprinkled with Storm, but he’s still researching the trend.

Eckelberry, who first discovered Storm executable files on several blogger sites this week, says Storm is showing up on blogs that use the mail-2-blogger feature, where bloggers can post via email. Google does have a CAPTCHA defense in place to prevent this kind of infection, requiring some bloggers to manually enter their code in order to post their blogs.

“But these guys are somehow flying under the radar,” Eckelberry says. “I have no idea how they are doing this.”

One site he found that’s laden with Storm as well as spam junk is http://www.visionbuzz.blogspot.com/, for instance. And a Google search for Storm’s infamous keywords, including “dude what if you wife finds this” and “man your insane,” comes up with hundreds of blog sites, he says.

To those who are still in the dark Storm is a Trojan that relies on social engineering, with a tempting message and link (remember the I love you virus?), and it’s all about expanding spam and the underlying botnet behind it. Storm ranks as a higher threat the typical worms

In general, there’s little harm that Storm can do to you as an individual. Once you look at the big picture, be alarmed. The Trojan gives Storm’s bot net the ability to launch powerful distributed DDOS attacks anywhere on the cyber world.

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