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| The Trojan horse has been widely spammed across
the internet. |
Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global
network of virus and spam analysis centres, have detected many
samples of a new Trojan horse being sent via email.
The Troj/BagleDl-W Trojan
horse appears to have been deliberately spammed out to email
addresses around the world. Emails seen so far containing the
malware have message bodies saying "Info" or
"Texte" and attached files with names such as
Health_and_knowledge.zip, text_sms.zip,
max.zip, Business.zip and
The_new_price.zip.
If the program inside the ZIP file is opened, the Trojan horse
tries to connect to one of a number of websites in order to
download further malicious code.
Despite the wide distribution of this malicious program, Sophos
has received very few reports of active infections. Nevertheless,
Sophos is advising customers to check that their anti-virus is
up-to-date.
"Trojan horses can turn off your anti-virus or firewall, opening
you up to further attack by hackers or even old viruses that
normally you would be protected against," said Graham Cluley, senior
technology consultant for Sophos. "My advice is keep your
anti-virus automatically updated and always be suspicious of
unsolicited email attachments."
Sophos advises companies to adopt an email gateway policy which
can protect against new email threats, even before anti-virus
updates are available.
"This Trojan horse is aiming to take advantage of many people's
reflex reaction when they receive an executable file via email:
rather than not going near it, they often can't resist
double-clicking on it, despite having no idea as to its safety,"
continued Cluley. "More companies are waking up to the benefits of
stopping executable code from entering their organisation via
email. Users who want to install software on their computer should
be receiving it from their IT department, not from friends at other
companies or potentially dangerous spam mailings."
Sophos recommends that businesses ensure their computers are
kept automatically up-to-date with the very latest 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.