postcard/e-card and "Membership" SPAM emails are STORM WORM

The Register had yesterday a report that the new series of SPAM emails - the recent "Welcome/Membership" emails - that try to lure you into clicking on a link are attempts to infect your computer with malicious software. They are new permutations of the previous ecard/postcard SPAM emails. If the reader goes to the web site, he is prompted that an applet (little program) needs to be installed for secure login. This program is called "applet.exe", runs on Windows machines (not Mac Os X or Linux), and creates a backdoor on the computer that allows hackers to take over the machine. This piece of malware or Trojan is known as "Storm", "Zhelatin" or W32/Newar. It changes and adapts rapidly, in fact so fast that many antivirus software packages do not yet recognize it intially. This is an extremely dangerous Trojan going around. Between January and May 2007 2817 infected hosts were detected, but this has skyrocketed to 1.7 million infected machines now. F-Secure has a list of Sender and Subject lines that the recent SPAMs use.