Security news
Security news3 March 2004
War of words: Computer worms resort to bad language as they attack each other, Sophos comments
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| The Netsky worms are named after the Skynet corporation from the movie The Terminator. |
Please note: some customers may find some of the language used by the viruses described below offensive.
Sophos researchers have discovered that the recently discovered W32/Bagle-J and W32/Bagle-K worms contain offensive messages directed at the prevalent Netsky mass-mailing virus.
Hidden inside the Bagle-J worm's code is the following text, which is never displayed.
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Hey,NetSky, fuck off you bitch, don't ruine our bussiness, wanna start a
war?
Inside Bagle-K the following text is hidden:
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Hey, NetSky, fuck off you bitch!
"The Bagle and Netsky worms are battling for pole position at the moment as the viruses hitting end users the hardest," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Clearly the author of the Bagle worms is unimpressed that Netsky is stealing some of the limelight and most of the headlines. This skirmish is a nuisance for computer users, of course, who are seeing the worms clogging up their email systems. Everybody should ensure they are running the very latest anti-virus updates and filtering dangerous content at the email gateway."
Meanwhile, the latest variant of the W32/MyDoom worm (W32/MyDoom-G) also has opinions on Netsky. W32/MyDoom-G contains the following message which is not displayed:
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to netsky's creator(s): imho, skynet is a decentralized peer-to-peer neural network. we have seen P2P in Slapper in Sinit only. they may be called skynets, but not your shitty app.
Sophos recommends companies automatically update their corporate virus protection, and filter attachments which may contain malicious code at the email gateway.
