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05 Mar 2004

Sophos protects against Bagle worm inside password-encrypted Zip files

Some of the Bagle worms arrive in the form of a password encrypted Zip file
Sophos customers are protected against the Bagle worms, even when they are in password encrypted Zip files.

Last updated: 15 March

Anti-virus experts at Sophos have added the ability to detect password-protected versions of the Bagle worm at the email gateway.

An update issued initially on 4 March gives Sophos MailMonitor, Sophos PureMessage and other third-party email gateway products which use the Sophos virus detection engine, the capability to detect the W32/Bagle-F, W32/Bagle-G, W32/Bagle-H, W32/Bagle-I, W32/Bagle-J, W32/Bagle-K, W32/Bagle-N and W32/Bagle-O worms, even though they can be transmitted inside a variably password-encrypted Zip file. Sophos detects the encrypted Zip files as W32/Bagle-Zip.

"Sophos Anti-Virus at the desktop could already protect our millions of customers around the world from infection by Bagle, but this update means the virus can be stopped even earlier at the gateway despite the malicious code being hidden inside an encrypted Zip file," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "This development is a real benefit to corporate customers defending against the latest virus outbreaks."

Sophos Enterprise Manager and PureMessage users automatically received this protection at their next scheduled update.

Prior to this update, Sophos PureMessage and MailMonitor users were able to prevent the password-protected variants of the Bagle worm from entering their organisation by quarantining encrypted ZIP files at the email gateway.

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.