Security news
Security news17 May 2004
Many reports of multilingual Sober-G worm spreading in the wild, says Sophos
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| On activation the Sober-G worm displays the above message |
Researchers at Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses against viruses and spam, are warning computer users about the latest variant of the Sober worm, W32/Sober-G, which has been spreading widely over the weekend.
The Sober-G worm is a mass mailing worm which sends itself to email addresses harvested from an infected computer. It uses a variety of subject lines including 'Mail Delivery failure', 'Your Password', and 'Registration confirmation'. If it determines it is being sent to a German-language computer then it sends messages in German instead of English.
"This latest variant of the Sober worm seems to be catching out computer users recovering from their Sasser hangovers," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "Although the much-publicised Sasser outbreak made computer users aware of the virus problem, it seems that some are still failing to keep their anti-virus software up-to-date. Automated updates would have prevented the headaches that many infected with Sober-G are now suffering."
Sophos recommends companies protect their email with a consolidated solution to thwart the virus and spam threats as well as secure their desktop and servers with automatically updated anti-virus protection.
