The W32/Zafi-D
worm, which was discovered on Tuesday posing
as a Christmas greeting, has continued to cause problems for
unprotected computer users. Experts at Sophos report that the virus
is currently accounting for 75% of all virus reports at Sophos's
global network of monitoring stations in the last 24 hours.
The W32/Zafi-D worm, which is believed to originate from
Hungary, spreads inside holiday season goodwill emails. The emails
can use a variety of different languages including English, French,
Spanish and Hungarian. Embedded inside the email is a lewd animated
GIF graphic of two "smiley" faces, which may fool some users into
thinking the attached virus is a joke program.
"Over 1 in every 10 emails travelling across the internet at the
moment is infected with the Zafi-D worm. Although anti-virus
protection is available it seems there must be many home users who
have been complacent and are allowing their PCs to belch out more
and more infected emails," said Graham Cluley, senior
technology consultant for Sophos. "Everyone should consider putting
in place automatic anti-virus updates, and a policy of blocking
dangerous attachments at the email gateway."
 |
| A typical message sent by the W32/Zafi-D
worm |
As well as spreading, the Zafi-D worm attempts to disable
anti-virus and firewall protection software on infected computers.
The worm also tries to open a backdoor on affected PCs, and
attempts to download further malicious code from the internet.
"The danger is that infected PCs could come under the control of
remote hackers," continued Cluley, "Those hackers could use the
legions of infected PCs to do whatever they want - destroy data,
steal information, launch spam campaigns or distributed
denial-of-service attacks. Computer users who are not properly
protected would be completely oblivious to what was happening
underneath their noses."
The Zafi-D worm generates a large amount of email traffic, not
only because it sends viral messages to addresses it finds on
infected PCs but also because it creates random email addresses
using harvested domain names in the hope that they will be found to
be genuine active mail accounts.
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.