Social engineering helps Sober top virus charts
Despite being released in the third week of last month, Sober was by far the most successful piece of malware and accounted for more than 40 percent of all viruses in November, according to Sophos.
The latest Sober variants started to spread on November 19 and within days began threatening corporate e-mail gateways due to the sheer volume of messages generated by infected PCs. Security experts say the virus was successful because it arrived in an e-mail that seemed to have been sent from the FBI or CIA, warning the recipient that they had been visiting illegal Web sites.
Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos, said that since the first-ever Sober virus was spotted over two years ago, the authors have used a number of different tricks to improve the malware's ability to replicate and persuade users into opening the attachment.
