A number of customers have contacted Sophos technical support
concerned about a new email-aware worm which exploits interest in
the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist activity.
The worm, called W32/Chet-A, arrives in the
form of an email attachment called 11september.exe. The email
message body claims that the attachment contains evidence of money
laundering and photographic evidence of friendly dialogue between
Osama Bin Laden of Al-Qaeda and the USA government.
The message goes on to describe how it contains evidence that
the FBI discussed with Al-Qaeda the best way to kill as many people
as possible in New York.
Obviously the message is intended to raise interest in the mind
of the email's recipient in an attempt to get them to launch the
attached executable file.
"The Chet worm author is the latest to use psychological tricks
to try to dupe users into opening malicious code. However, this is
probably the sickest and lamest trick to date," said Graham Cluley,
senior technology consultant, Sophos Anti-Virus. "The
implausibility of the allegations contained in the worm's email
will hopefully mean most people will instantly recognise this as
suspicious."
To date Sophos has received no reports of this worm from the
wild, but reminds all computer users to keep their anti-virus
protection up-to-date and practise safe
computing by not launching unsolicited executable code.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.