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Pushdo gang a is 'business-orientated'

The people behind the pushdo internet security threat are business-minded and are increasingly coming up with ingenious ways to serve up spammed emails, an online security researcher has stated.

In order to ensure the malicious advertisements reach end users, the crooks have added to the tools in the botnet an inbuilt network sniffer, which records all emails sent from infected machines, according to David Sancho of Trend Micro.

"When the computer first becomes infected, one of the modules drops a device driver - "tcpsr.sys" - that intercepts all outgoing email traffic being sent and logs the recipients of each message," explained Mr Sancho.

"Every now and then, it then sends this information to a server that collects all this data allowing the gang to know exactly how many mails for each campaign have been sent."

The malware researcher went on to state that this shows how businesses-orientated the people behind the online security nuisance are.

Early this week Trend Micro stated that consumers who get lured to a malicious site serving the malware have the pushdo installer directly injected into the memory of their machines.

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