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| The racist spam has been sent in the run-up to
European Union elections |
Internet users in Germany and elsewhere around the world have
been bombarded with a barrage of racist emails in the run-up to
European elections.
The emails, which promote right-wing groups in the run-up to
European elections this weekend, appear to be being sent from
computers compromised by the widespread W32/Sober-G worm.
Some of the spam emails pretend to come from respectable German
news outlets, such as Der Spiegel, but contain racist messages such
as "What Germany needs are German children" and "Asylum-seeker
tortures animals to death".
"Whether this flood of racist email is coming from right-wing
extremists, or those who wish to discredit right-wing parties in
the run-up to the elections is unclear," said Graham Cluley, senior
technology consultant for Sophos. "Whoever is responsible for this
spam attack is breaking the law -using computers which have been
virus infected to spread their offensive messages. All computer
users should ensure their systems are properly protected against
viruses and hackers to prevent this kind of abuse."
Sober-G is a mass-mailing worm which sends itself to email
addresses harvested from an infected computer. It has hit German
users particularly hard because it can send itself using German
language as well as the English language usually used by
viruses.
"If your computer was infected by the Sober-G worm then you
could unwittingly be part of the problem - unknown to you, your
computer may be sending out racist messages on the spammers'
behalf. This is further evidence that spammers and virus writers
are working closely with each other," continued Cluley.
Computer crime authorities in Germany scored a success last
month with the arrest of a teenager in
connection with the Sasser worm.
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.
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.