02 Oct 2002
Are your printers possessed by the Bugbear?
 |
| The Bugbear-A worm prints out pages of junk. |
Researchers at Sophos, a world leader in corporate anti-virus
protection, have revealed that a bug in the code of the W32/Bugbear-A worm may
unwittingly alert users to its presence.
W32/Bugbear-A not only spreads via email attachment, but also
attempts to copy itself around your network.
The worm tries to copy itself to all types of shared network
resources, including printers. Printers cannot become infected, but
they will attempt to print out the raw binary data of
W32/Bugbear-A's executable code. This usually results in many
wasted pages of paper.
"You may be surprised to find your printer churning out reams of
gobbledegook and gibberish," said Graham Cluley, senior technology
consultant for Sophos. "However, if it were not for this bug in the
worm's code it's possible some computer users would not have
realised until much later that something strange was occurring on
their network. Clearly many viruses are not the work of careful
programmers keen to avoid bugs."
Sophos released protection against the W32/Bugbear-A worm on
Monday 30 September, 15:42 GMT. Customers who were using Sophos MailMonitor for SMTP's threat reduction
technology were capable of protecting against W32/Bugbear-A in
advance of this time.
About Sophos
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.