Anti-Putin protesters targeted by data-wiping malware

Criminals with an apparent grudge against demonstrators opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin are targeting the country's citizens with data-wiping malware, Symantec has reported. 

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The attack uses the lure of one of a number of Russian-language protest subject lines, including, 'Meeting for equal elections,' and 'all to demonstration,' offering instructions in the form of an attached Word document.

Attacks targeting popular events and interests are utterly standard but the engineering of this attack has unusual elements to it that hint at the possibility of a political as well as straightforwardly criminal motivation.

The first is its 500KB size, about fifty times larger than the average bulk spam which are normally designed to pass across the mail infrastructure as efficiently and unobtrusively as possible. Symantec doesn't spell it out but commercial or criminal spammers would be unlikely to be so send spam emails of this size, even when using Word documents.

More @ networkworld.com/news/2012/031312-anti-putin-protesters-targeted-by-data-wiping-257216.html