On December 1, 2005, two e-mail messages were sent from a computer in Western Australia to members of two different human rights organizations. Each e-mail message carried a Microsoft Word document with a previously unknown exploit that would take control of the targeted person’s computer and open up a beachhead into the group’s network. The attack failed, as did a second attempt to infiltrate the same human-rights groups a week later, due in no small part to an overabundance of caution on the part of e-mail security provider MessageLabs, which initially blocked the e-mails based on the strangeness of the Word attachments. The attacks only targeted a single person at each organization and, after the two attempts, never repeated. Such targeted Trojan horse attacks are quickly becoming a large concern for corporations, the military and political organizations, said MessageLabs security researcher Alex Shipp. The e-mail security provider intercepted 298 such attacks between May 2005 and May 2006, and the threat of targeted Trojans is only increasing. “If you haven’t noticed these attacks and you are a big company, you have likely already been attacked,” Shipp told attendees at the Virus Bulletin 2006 conference.”
Targeted Trojan horse attacks are quickly becoming a major issue for the antivirus and computer-security industries.