Mimail Worm Spawns Variants
New versions of the Mimail e-mail worm are circulating on the Internet, according to alerts issued Monday from leading antivirus software companies. The new variants are similar to a version of the worm that appeared last week, Mimail.C, and contain instructions to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against a number of antispam and e-commerce Web sites, according to alerts posted by Sophos, Symantec, and others.
The new variations, dubbed Mimail.E, Mimail.F, and Mimail.H all spread using e-mail messages taken from the hard drives of computers the worm infects, Sophos said.
Like other mass-mailing worms, Mimail targets machines running Microsoft's Windows operating system and alters the Windows configuration on those machines it infects to ensure that the worm runs automatically whenever Windows starts, Sophos said.
