Malware Spammers Get Sense of Humor - Via Threat Level:

Threat Level was intrigued the other day to get an e-mail with the subject line, "God Destroys Boise for Not Being Gay Enough."

Intrigued enough to open it. The body of the e-mail made an odd reference to Barack Obama being an anorexic, over-exerciser and had a link to a file called viewmovie.html on a U.K. domain owned by Virgin Media.

That seemed sketchy, especially since I had no idea who the e-mail was from.

So after a little search engine testing, it turns out the title seems to have been ripped comes from a somewhat obscure parody story written in June about a San Francisco evangelical preacher saying God was punishing Midwesterners with storms.

Then if one actually visits the URL, the site tries to install Trojan.Pandex, disguising it as an Active X codec needed to view a video.

That's not funny.

But as it turns out, Threat Level isn't the only one who thinks these malware spammers have a sense of humor with their choice of lures.

For instance, Jon Price at posterous.com got a different e-mail he found just as entertaining taking him to what looks to be the same exploit.

Threat Level can handle the Russian mafia trying to steal my PayPal account, hackers sniffing my IM traffic at cafes, and million-strong botnets talking using peer-to-peer software.

But marrying the Onion's sense of humor to a trojan downloader? That's a step too far for Threat Level.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)