It's All About Mary: Naughty E-Mail Actually A Trojan

The Trojan, dubbed Backdoor.Sysbug, BackDoor-CAG, and Troj/Sysbug-A by a variety of security firms, comes with the subject heading of 'Re[2]:Mary and claims to contain images of the message's author having wild sex with a girlfriend.

"Hello my dear Mary," the e-mail's message opens. "Do you remember when we were having wild sex in my house? I remember it all like it was only yesterday. You said that the pictures would not come out good, but you were very wrong, they are great."

In fact, the compressed file attachment -- in .zip format -- contains a Trojan horse which when launched, infects Windows systems and attempts to steal private information, including e-mail account usernames and passwords and dial-up Internet account usernames and passwords. Any information it hijacks from the PC can be retrieved by the attacker.

Because Sysbug was seeded via a spam-style mass mailing and is not self-replicating -- in other words, it cannot spread from an infected a machine -- anti-virus companies have ranked the threat as low. Network Associates, for instance, currently rates the Trojan as a 'low' threat, while Symantec assigned it a '1' in its 1 through 5 scale.

This story courtesy of TechWeb .