As you can read here, the author of Zlob has once again hidden a message inside a variant. This time it’s about best wishes for the new year to the MS virus response team and future plans, so to speak. If he truly was offered a job by MS, those details may be too much and help reveal his (or her?) identity. We shall see …
Here’s the message (source is the above link):
For Windows Defender’s Team:
I saw your post in the blog (10-Oct-2008) about my previous message.
Just want to say ‘Hello’ from Russia.
You are really good guys. It was a surprise for me that Microsoft can respond on threats so fast.
I can’t sign here now (he-he, sorry), how it was some years ago for more seriously vulnerability for all Windows 😉
Happy New Year, guys, and good luck!
P.S. BTW, we are closing soon. Not because of your work. :-))
So, you will not see some of my great 😉 ideas in that family of software.
Try to search in exploits/shellcodes and rootkits.
Also, it is funny (probably for you), but Microsoft offered me a job to help improve some of Vista’s protection. It’s not interesting for me, just a life’s irony.
// Oliver
PS: The smileys were part of the message in textual form!