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By Lucian Constantin

September 30, 2013 12:15 PM ET

IDG News Service - A piece of malware designed to launch brute-force password guessing attacks against websites built with popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla has started being used to also attack email and FTP servers.

The malware is known as Fort Disco and was documented in August by researchers from DDoS mitigation vendor Arbor Networks who estimated that it had infected over 25,000 Windows computers and had been used to guess administrator account passwords on over 6,000 WordPress, Joomla and Datalife Engine websites.

Once it infects a computer, the malware periodically connects to a command and control (C&C) server to retrieve instructions, which usually include a list of thousands of websites to target and a password that should be tried to access their administrator accounts.

The Fort Disco malware seems to be evolving, according to a Swiss security researcher who maintains the Abuse.ch botnet tracking service. "Going down the rabbit hole, I found a sample of this particular malware that was brute-forcing POP3 instead of WordPress credentials," he said Monday in a blog post.

The Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) allows email clients to connect to email servers and retrieve messages from existing accounts.

The C&C server for this particular Fort Disco variant responds with a list of domain names accompanied by their corresponding MX records (mail exchanger records). The MX records specify which servers are handling email service for those particular domains.

The C&C server also supplies a list of standard email accounts -- usually admin, info and support -- for which the malware should try to brute force the password, the Abuse.ch maintainer said.

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Fort Disco malware is now targeting email and FTP servers