Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses against spam and
viruses, is warning of a new worm called Bagle-A (W32/Bagle-A). Following
many reports in Australia, Sophos has already started to see
multiple reports coming from the UK and other countries, and users
are advised to be cautious of emails received over the weekend with
the subject line "Hi".
The Bagle-A worm (also known as Beagle) arrives as an email
message which talks about a test and has an attachment - a program
file with a random name. This file which can pretend to be the
Windows calculator, opens a security hole in the infected user's
computer which can be exploited by hackers.
"As users come back to work after the weekend they are at risk
of finding the malicious Bagle worm in their email inbox," said
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "The worm
pretends to be a "techie looking" test email to fool people into
running the dangerous attachment - not knowing they are potentially
giving hackers the power to run destructive code on their
computer."
"Computer users should be wary of any programs delivered by
email even if they seem to come from a known contact. If you email
programs around, you should get out of this habit now, as it
encourages bad security practice," continued Cluley.
Sophos recommends the use of email gateway software, which can
block all programs, whether infected or not, in order to enforce
safe computing practices.
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.