The W32/Sober-I
worm, which was discovered on Friday, has
continued to cause problems for unprotected computer users in the
days since. Experts at Sophos report that the virus is currently
accounting for 55% of all virus reports at Sophos's global network
of monitoring stations.
"Sober-I is the biggest new virus we have seen for some time.
There is a danger that users have become complacent because the
virus scene has been relatively quiet recently - this may have
contributed to Sober's success," said Graham Cluley, senior
technology consultant for Sophos. "Clearly too many people have
still not put in place a system of automatic anti-virus updates, or
a policy of blocking dangerous attachments at the email gateway.
Businesses are waking up to the need for this high level of
protection, but are still being bombarded by viral emails -
possibly from infected home users."
The Sober-I worm sends itself to email addresses harvested from
an infected computer. It uses a variety of subject lines, message
bodies and file attachment names in either English or German,
including the following:
Subject:Oh God
Text:I was surprised, too!
Who_could_suspect_something_like_that? shityiiiii
Attachment:im_shock.zip
Subject:Delivery_failure_notice
Text:This mail was generated automatically. More info
about --<random name>-- under: http://www.<random
URL>
Attachment:mail_147.zip
"Unprotected computer users, who return to their email inbox
after the long weekend, should be careful not to launch unsolicited
attachments which could spawn more copies of the worm," continued
Cluley.
Sophos recommends companies protect their email with a consolidated solution to thwart the virus and spam
threats and secure their desktops 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.