Stuxnet was only the beginning. The successful exploitation of the (still unpatched) Windows LNK flaw has prompted other malware attackers to try to achieve the same results.
Luckily for us, a generic signature for this exploit method has already been added to many antivirus solutions, and the attackers have not had the time (or the inclination?) to design a new variant of the exploit.
F-Secure reports that so far, four malware families have been trying to exploit the vulnerability:
- Chymine – a fairly new keylogger that takes advantage of the flaw to infect the computer, but does not spread further
- Vobfus – a family of obfuscated worms that has been first spotted in 2009 and that has been using shortcut files as a social engineering technique from the start, but has previously always required users to run it.
- Sality – a well known and popular polymorphic virus
- ZeuS – the information stealing Trojan. F-Secure discovered a recent run of poorly written fake emails purportedly coming from security@microsoft.com, and which tries to get the users to infect their own computers by installing the Trojan disguised as a Windows patch.