Waledac Botnet Makes Its First Push Of The New Year

An old threat has reappeared in the new year, researchers said this week.

According to a blog by researchers at Websense, the Waledac botnet appeared in a new version in the last days of 2010, sending out large amounts of new year-related spam messages. It then stopped spamming in the evening of Jan. 4.

On Tuesday morning a new variant of Waledac was distributed to members of the botnet, according to Websense. "On Wednesday, it started spamming again, but now it's back to sending pharmaceutical spam promoting 'the magic blue pill,' which we have seen previous versions of Waledac do in the past." As in previous spam campaigns, the spammers are using redirections via compromised legitimate sites, the researchers say.

When clicked, the link leads to a Canadian pharmaceutical spam page, according to Websense.

"The new spam campaign doesn't redirect to malicious content, just to spam content," the blog says. "But that could change at any point if the people behind Waledac decides to grow the botnet.

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