Trojan Horse Making Its Way Into Windows Systems

A new Trojan horse hidden in an e-mail purported to be carrying pornographic pictures is beginning to make the rounds on the Internet.

The Trojan is known as Sysbug and provides its creator with a backdoor into infected systems running versions of Windows from 95 through XP. It copies itself to the Windows installation folder and also adds a new registry entry that ensures the Trojan will run every time the PC starts up.

Once resident on a computer, Sysbug is capable of copying a variety of data about the machine and sending it back to its creator, according to Sophos Inc., an anti-virus company based in Lynnfield, Mass. The Trojan gathers data on e-mail accounts and remote access accounts, then opens TCP port 5555 and listens for commands from its author.

The Trojan arrives in an e-mail with an attachment that is zipped and contains an executable. The e-mail begins:

"Hello my dear Mary,

I have been thinking about you all night. I would like to apologize for the other night when …"

The message then goes into more explicit detail.

The e-mail comes from james2003@hotmail.com and the subject line says "Re[2]: Mary."

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