World Cup wallchart Trojan horse.

Sophos have warned users about a Trojan horse that poses as a wallchart for the World Cup tournament.

The Haxdoor-IN Trojan horse has been spammed out to computer users via a link in an email message, which offers a free wallchart for football fans who wish to follow their favourite teams in the International football tournament. If users are tempted into running the malicious program they risk allowing hackers to gain access to their computer for criminal ends. All examples of the emails seen so far have been in the German language, but there is no reason to believe that hackers will not switch to using other languages to increase their pool of potential victims. This is not the first time that hackers have taken advantage of the World Cup competition. A year ago, the Sober-N worm offered tickets to the tournament in an attempt to entrap unprotected users. In 2002, the VBS/Chick-F virus tried to exploit workers desperate to find out the latest scores from the World Cup in South Korea/Japan. In the run-up to the World Cup competition in France in 1998, another football-inspired virus asked infected victims to gamble on who the winner might be, and if the user did not choose the right team triggered a warhead which was capable of wiping all the data off the hard drive. It would be no surprise at all if more malware was written as the World Cup rapidly approaches," "Everyone should be careful not to fall foul of football-related viruses and Trojan horses, as well as football-related spam and lottery scams."

Sophos's proactive technology was capable of detecting the Trojan horse (naming it as Troj/Haxdor-Fam), and is defending customers' computers without requiring ,an update.

www.sophos.com