Kim Jong-il malware circulating

Spam messages with malicious attachments have been detected with subject lines referring to the death of Kim Jong-il.

Some messages contained a .pdf attachment named ‘brief_introduction_of_kim-jong-il.pdf' which contained a malicious trojan.

Trend Micro anti-spam research engineer Michael Casayuran said the trojan, TROJ_PIDIEF.EGQ, opened a non-malicious pdf file that contained a picture of Jong-il and a short biography of the former North Korean leader.

“Aside from this particular spam attack, we've also encountered malicious documents that bear file names mentioning Kim Jong-il.," Casayuran said.

Another malicious Word document related to North Korea's nuclear programmes and was detected as trojan TROJ_ARTIEF.AEB.

When opened it dropped BKDR_PCCLIEN.bqd which connected to a command and control server through port 8000.

“Here at TrendLabs, the death of a globally known person has become an automatic trigger for us to look for attacks trying to taking advantage in order to protect our customers who are trying to look for more information. Such events generate global interest in a very short amount of time, so they make very good social engineering lures.”

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com