It didn’t use sex, it didn’t use money, it used the buzz around the iPhone, the one gadget that everyone wanted

Graham Cluley , senior technology consultant at Sophos.

The iPhone and the App Store has been a runaway success, the biggest blockbuster of 2008 that shows no signs of slowing down. However, someone took advantage of the amazing popularity of the iPhone and sent out a really well-disguised Trojan Horse. What they did was to start a hoax email campaign. The e-mail featured a Trojan Horse in an attachment masquerading as the Penguin Panic game for Apple’s iPhone.

Would you open an attachment which comes from an innocuous looking source and tells you something about the “iPhone’s most famous game”? That too, with a pretty adorable looking Penguin peeking its nose? You probably would have. Now read on what happened to those who did so.

Now, when Windows users clicked on the attachment it actually downloaded the malware Agent-HNY. This Trojan Horse in turn let other malwares infect users and left them open to identity theft and turned their computer into a “zombie”. This resulted in sending out spam messages to those on contact lists. More than a quarter of all malware attachments were credited to this innovative Trojan Horse, which in any case has recorded an alarming 800% increase in this quarter:

One in every 416 emails sent between July and September had an attachment (Malware ) designed to infect the recipient’s PC, compared with one in 3,333 emails in the previous quarter.

For good or bad, you just can’t ignore the iPhone and the App Store.