Sophos has today issued protection against the new Coconut worm
(W32/Coconut-A) which sends itself via email in the form of a
coconut shy game.
If users play the game - which involves throwing coconuts at the
heads of notorious Belgian hacker, Frans Devaere, and Sophos's own
senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley - they accrue points.
The more points the user scores, the fewer files the worm tries to
infect.
The female virus writer known as Gigabyte has confessed to
writing this worm. This is the second virus she has written
dedicated to Cluley and follows the Parrot worm which was
released in mid-2001. Gigabyte has centred her attention on Cluley
since he claimed that the majority of virus writers are male.
"Gigabyte remains obsessed by proving to the world - and to me
in particular - that it's not just blokes who can write viruses,"
said Cluley. "My point has never been that women are incapable of
writing viruses; it's just that - in most cases - they have better
things to do with their time."
"That said, all this attention from Gigabyte is flattering. Next
time, chocolates or flowers would be nicer," continued Cluley.
The Coconut worm spreads by email and comes with the attachment
'coconut.exe'. If users double-click on this attachment the worm
automatically propagates to all contacts in the user's address book
and fires up the game.
The game awards one point for knocking off Devaere's head and
two points for knocking off Cluley's. The more proficient the user
is at playing the game, the fewer files the worm will go on to
infect. For example, if the user gets no points, the worm infects
six files; if they get one point, five files will be targeted; and
so on.
Sophos has received no reports of the Coconut worm circulating
in the wild, but recommends that users block all executable code at
the email gateway in order to prevent worms such as this from
infiltrating their IT systems.
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.