Fake earthquake warnings cover spam attacks

A new spam outbreak attributed to the Storm Botnet has been hitting the Internet since June.

Messages warn of earthquakes hitting well-known locations around the world, causing significant destruction and loss of life. They include a link to a Website on a .cn domain that claims the quake measured in at 9.0 on the Richter scale and has caused casualties; it also says it threatens preparations for the upcoming Olympics hosted in China.

The site also contains links to supposed news video, but be warned: the video downloads the Nuwar-E worm. Variants of this attack bait people in similar fashion, noting incidents at the Eiffel Tower in France, the Giza pyramids in Egypt, and Stonehenge in the UK.

Secure Computing’s TrustedSource reputation security system and research team logged a 10-fold global increase in volume of these spam messages from June 18th-24th.