CipherTrust, Inc. has found a 23 per cent increase in the total number of zombies detected this week due to the release of a modification of the Mocbot worm.
CipherTrust Research Labs has identified an average of 265,000 zombies per day since the release of the Mocbot worm, which is exploiting the MS060-040 Windows vulnerability announced on August 8th.
Ed Rowley, technical consultant at CipherTrust said: "Mail volumes have once again reached a high this week, with spam making up 81 per cent of the traffic. Much of this increase can be attributed to the spam originating from the new zombies unleashed by the Mocbot worm." The Mocbot worm infects machines through flaws in Windows and programmes in the Microsoft Office suite. Any computer compromised by the worm will become part of a large network set up to send out junk mail.
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www.ciphertrust.com
Taken from Information Security Bulletin.