The Celebrity gang, aka Pushdo, was responsible for another large spam run over the weekend. This has become an almost weekly occurrence for the Celebrity Botnet which tends to send large volumes of spam containing malware over the weekends. When it is not sending malware, the Celebrity Botnet typically sends spam that advertises Viagra or male enlargement drugs.
The spam messages seen today all contained the names of celebrities such as Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie and Bruce Willis in an attempt to entice the reader into opening the attachment. The attachment is actually a downloader that will download the Pushdo bot. The malware attachment differs slightly between spam runs in an attempt to avoid detection by antivirus software.
The last time that we reported on the Celebrity Botnet it was responsible for 20 percent of all spam that we receive; it now accounts for around six percent.
MailMarshal Customers should note that we have released a ZeroDay update to protect against this latest malicious spam run.
