 |
| The virus spreads itself pretending to be a video
of Osama Bin Laden. |
Experts at Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses
against viruses and spam, have warned users to beware of emails
claiming to contain videos of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden as
they really contain a malicious computer worm.
The W32/Famus-F
worm has been discovered in the wake of George W Bush's re-election
as President of the United States of America, and less than a week
after an Arabic television station broadcast the first videoed
speech by Osama Bin Laden since the US-led war in Afghanistan.
"Hackers and virus writers will try all kinds of tricks to
entice people into running their malicious code," said Graham
Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "It seems this
time that the virus writer has focused on the public's appetite for
breaking news on the war against terror."
The W32/Famus-F worm arrives in the form of a bilingual email,
with the following characteristics:
Subject line:
Mas terrorismo este ano \More terrorism this year
Message body:
Password: "cnn"
Ultimas declaraciones de Bin Laden
ReenvÃe este video a todo el mundo.
======================================================
Password: "cnn"
Last speech from Bin Laden
Please forwards this video to everybody.'
"There will be many who will be interested to know how
terrorists will react to George W Bush's success at the polls,"
continued Cluley. "Those people should not lower their guard and be
fooled into accepting unsolicited email attachments."
If executed the worm attempts to forward itself to email
addresses found on the infected computers and drops a number of
files onto the hard drive. Hidden inside the virus is the following
text in Spanish:
Esta computadora ha sido infectada por el virus LIBERTAD.
Como protesta por la violacion del derecho a la libertad de expresi
En estos momentos toda la informaci disco duro esta siendo
borrada
El Hobbit
This translates into English as:
This computer has been infected with the LIBERTAD (FREEDOM)
virus. This is to protest against the violation of free expression
rights. Now all the data in your hard drive is been
erased
The Hobbit
Reassuringly, the Famus-F worm is not spreading very
successfully, however Sophos continues to recommend computer users
practise safe computing as
well as running up-to-date anti-virus
software.
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.