German spam deluge blamed on Sober.Q
A new variant of the Sober mass-mailing worm is being blamed for the deluge of German spam messages flooding inboxes this weekend, anti-virus experts warned on Sunday. The spam barrage arrives with politically-themed messages in German and contains only links to news articles on German Web sites. Finnish anti-virus vendor F-Secure Corp. said the spam run is being powered by Sober.Q, the latest mutant of a worm that was first spotted in October 2003.
The latest spam barrage comes just two weeks after Sober.P launched a massive attack by promising tickets to next year's World Cup soccer tournament in Germany. In that attack, the worm spread quickly by harvesting e-mail addresses from infected systems.
This weekend's spam run does not include executable attachments and resembles the methods used in June 2004 by Sober.H, an earlier variant.
