ZeuS, Sality, Chymine and Vobfus jump on the LNK vulnerability bandwagon

Stuxnet was only the beginning. The successful exploitation of the (still unpatched) Windows LNK flaw has prompted other malware attackers to try to achieve the same results.

Luckily for us, a generic signature for this exploit method has already been added to many antivirus solutions, and the attackers have not had the time (or the inclination?) to design a new variant of the exploit.

F-Secure reports that so far, four malware families have been trying to exploit the vulnerability:

• Chymine – a fairly new keylogger that takes advantage of the flaw to infect the computer, but does not spread further
• Vobfus – a family of obfuscated worms that has been first spotted in 2009 and that has been using shortcut files as a social engineering technique from the start, but has previously always required users to run it.
• Sality – a well known and popular polymorphic virus
• ZeuS – the information stealing Trojan. F-Secure discovered a recent run of poorly written fake emails purportedly coming from security@microsoft.com, and which tries to get the users to infect their own computers by installing the Trojan disguised as a Windows patch.