By Jeremy Kirk


Fri, April 24, 2009 — IDG News Service — A Vietnamese security company has detected what it believes is a new worm that thwarts Google's security protections in order to register new dummy Gmail accounts from which to send spam.

Bach Koa Internetwork Security (BKIS) said the worm was discovered earlier this week in one of its honeypots, the term for a computer set up to catch samples of malicious software. BKIS has named the malware "W32.Gaptcha.Worm."

Once a computer is infected with Gaptcha, the worm launches the Internet Explorer browser and goes to Gmail's new account registration page. It begins to fill in random names of fictitious users. When confronted with a CAPTCHA, the worm sends the image to a remote server for processing, wrote Do Manh Dung, senior malware researcher, on the BKIS blog.

Continued @ CIO.com