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| A paedophile who received an email from the
Sober-Z worm gave himself up to the police. |
A media report by Reuters has revealed that a child porn
offender has turned himself in to the authorities after mistaking
an email sent by a computer worm as an official warning that he was
being investigated.
The 20-year-old German man, who has not been named, mistook a
message sent by the prevalent Sober-Z worm which claimed
he was being investigated by Germany's Federal Crime Office (known
as the BKA) for visting illegal websites. Police at the city of
Paderborn charged the man after finding pornographic pictures of
children on his computer.
"We're used to explaining to people that there's no such thing
as a good virus, but in this case it appears that the Sober-Z worm
has accidentally scared an internet paedophile into contacting the
police." said Graham
Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "If he had
been scanning his email for viruses he would never have received
the message from the Sober worm. If jailed he'll have plenty of
time to reflect on whether he should have believed everything that
was sent to him via email."
The W32/Sober-Z worm, which is presently accounting for over 78%
of all viruses reported to Sophos, can disguise
itself as a message from investigators at the FBI, CIA or BKA.
A typical email can read as follows:
Dear Sir/Madam,
We have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal
Websites.
Important: Please answer our questions! The list of
questions are attached.
Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison
Federal Bureau of Investigation-FBI-
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW , Room 3220
Washington , DC 20535
Phone: (202) 324-30000
Sophos customers proactively protected against Sober-Z
worm
Sophos's proactive Genotype™ technology was capable of detecting
the Sober-Z worm proactively (naming it as W32/Sober-Gen),
defending customers' computers without requiring an update.
Sophos PureMessage, Sophos's consolidated
email gateway solution which defends businesses against both spam
and viruses, can also block the spam messages sent by the worm.
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.