Trojan taps into London bombings

Less than a day after the explosions in London, a Trojan horse has appeared that poses as news footage of the attacks, MessageLabs said Friday. The malicious code arrives in an e-mail with the subject line "TERROR HITS LONDON" that is designed to resemble a CNN newsletter, the e-mail security company said.

MessageLabs said that the e-mail asks the recipient to open the "attachments for unique amateur videoshots." When executed, the attachment copies itself to the user's system. It then attempts to obtain a list of the e-mail servers the machine has access to and starts to use these to send out spam, MessageLabs said. The e-mail is not widespread, and only a handful of copies of the e-mail were intercepted, a company representative said.