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01 Mar 2004

Netsky-E discovered. Sophos researchers protect against another variant of worm

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As the W32/Netsky-D worm continues to generate a large number of emails across the internet, Sophos anti-virus researchers have discovered yet another variant of the worm: W32/Netsky-E.

Like its predecessors, W32/Netsky-E spreads via email and shared network drives but does not appear to be causing as much havoc.

"Whoever is behind the Netsky worms is hell bent on causing as much chaos as possible," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "They have deliberately released new versions of their virus, tweaked to try and avoid detection by anti-virus software. Computer users should heed the warning and be wary of any unsolicited email attachment."

Sophos has already published protection against the new variant, which at the time of writing is still being analysed. Sophos Enterprise Manager and PureMessage customers are automatically protected at their next scheduled update.

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.