17 May 2004
Many reports of multilingual Sober-G worm spreading in the wild, says Sophos
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| On activation the Sober-G worm displays the above
message |
Researchers at Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses
against viruses and spam, are warning computer users about the
latest variant of the Sober worm, W32/Sober-G, which has
been spreading widely over the weekend.
The Sober-G worm is a mass mailing worm which sends itself to
email addresses harvested from an infected computer. It uses a
variety of subject lines including 'Mail Delivery failure', 'Your
Password', and 'Registration confirmation'. If it determines it is
being sent to a German-language computer then it sends messages in
German instead of English.
"This latest variant of the Sober worm seems to be catching out
computer users recovering from their Sasser hangovers," said Graham
Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "Although the
much-publicised Sasser outbreak made computer users aware of the
virus problem, it seems that some are still failing to keep their
anti-virus software up-to-date. Automated updates would have
prevented the headaches that many infected with Sober-G are now
suffering."
Sophos recommends companies protect their email with a consolidated solution to thwart the virus and spam
threats as well as secure their desktop and servers with
automatically updated anti-virus protection.
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.