By Will Sturgeon, 19 November 2004 13:40
NEWS Antivirus companies are today all warning of the latest email threat - a variant of the Sober worm.
Labelled as either variant 'I' or 'J' the worm has been spreading rapidly since first thing this morning. MessageLabs intercepted its first copy of the worm at 06:01(GMT).
The worm appears in an email which so far has been seen in English and German language versions, according to Trend Micro.
The English subject lines include 'Oh God' and 'Delivery_failure_notice' but the German version is entirely more provocative, according to Sophos. The emails purport to come from a 21-year-old blonde Go-Go dancer who claims to have attached naked photographs of herself.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said: "Although much-publicised virus outbreaks in the past should have made users more nervous of double-clicking on unsolicited email attachments, some still find it hard to resist."
Bogdan Dumitru, CTO at BitDefender, said: "The remarkable thing about this new virus is the amazing speed at which it is spreading. This may prove, once more, that computer users have not learned anything, or too little, from past virus outbreak experiences."
According to Trend Micro some versions of the email body copy include claims that the message has been scanned and found safe by various antivirus companies.
David Kopp, head of TrendLabs EMEA at Trend Micro, urged companies to deploy stringent rule blocking and security policies for attachments with extensions such as exe, pif and scr.
Comments
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1. royston
anything to do with naked go go dancers will be opened by anyone that doesnt care about security for curiosity sake alone. the world is full of sex starved idiots that dont give a damn. they just reboot their ancient pc,s wich takes minutes if useing old os's. their excuses are "i,m only human after all and its only a computer." its these people that should be targeted and brought to justice for activly spreading these stupid virus's. brain dead gormless "i think i know it all teenagers" are one group i can think of.you know them, gormless hormone driven ones! and the kids that havent got parents controling their surfeing at home. there is millions of em all over the planet. throw the book at em or at least give em a warning.curiosity killed the cat is one saying i can think of.
2. Ruprecht
Royston maaaate,
Sex starved or not there's always time for naked go-go dancers!!!!
The same goes for beer and chips...funny how none of these virus e-mails offer free beer or chips isn't it? ;o)
R
3. Goten Xiao
What I'm amazed about is the fact that most of these people actually have antivirus software, but it lacks basic features such as a resident shield (to scan for viruses as they execute) and an email scanner.
The other shocking/disturbing thing is how many people are willing to open the files. If I receive an email with an attachment, and I haven't a) been expecting one or b) the address/name is unknown to me, it usually goes straight into the bin...
4. Sander Mulder
When will politics do something about
these threats? Education and informa-
tion on a global scale will hopefully
reach more users and make the next
generation aware of the dangers which
the internet brings into their homes.
I have neither seen a commercial nor
a campaign that was destined to inform
the ordinary PC-user. Internet is an
infrastructure and as such also part
of the responsibility of governments.
That millions still click on email-
attachments is only because they have
no idea what they are doing. make them
aware...and half of the problem is
solved.
Spetz