Viruses & Malware

It's the oldest trick in the virus writer's handbook.

Promise free stuff and they will click.

Around the world, and especially in Europe, soccer fans are falling for an e-mail promise of free tickets to the 2006 World Cup finals in Berlin, Germany.

The computer worm, known as Sober-N, was identified on Monday, and has been spreading dramatically.

"Essentially, it is doing classic social engineering," said Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst at the anti-virus company Sophos.

The newly detected Sober.p mutant of the Win32.Sober worm has spread rapidly causing an "epidemic in western Europe", according to IT security experts.

Virus analysts at Kaspersky Lab reported that data from ISPs shows the worm to be the most common malicious program found in email traffic.

"Sober.p has broken records in terms of the number of infected messages sent out and the speed of propagation throughout western European segments of the internet, in The Netherlands, Germany and Hungary among others," Kaspersky Labs warned.

Only one new piece of malware was prevalent enough to make it into the 10 most-active viruses last month as users continued to ignore updates, according to anti-virus vendor Sophos.

The Zafi-D virus, which was first discovered late last year, remains at the top of Sophos' top 10 virus list, accounting for 46.6 percent of all infections in April 2005. Mytob-Z was the only virus discovered in April to make the top 10 and was responsible for 1.3 percent of all infections.

L33tdawg: If you're around the Asia Pacific region, don't miss your chance to catch Mr. Hypponen's keynote presentation at HITBSecConf2005 - Malaysia this coming September. It's going to be big! :)

A virus that spreads from cell phone to cell phone has made its way to 20 different countries around the world, a Finnish anti-virus expert said.

Only one new virus, Mytob.Z, made it into the top 10 list for April, according to antivirus data from Sophos.

Top of the list was Zafi.B, which accounted for nearly half of all viruses detected. This is the fifth month Zafi.B has topped the charts.

"Although Mytob.Z only accounts for a small percentage of the top 10 reports, it is the only new worm that has managed to break into the stronghold of old threats," said Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos.

Attendees at the Infosecurity Europe conference in London have predicted the end of e-mail-borne viruses, suggesting the problem has simply had its day.

However, the most severe issue users now face is the growing problem of spyware, according to some, which is more than ready, willing and able to fill the void.

A worm that zipped through America Online's instant message network Tuesday was quickly shut down by the Internet service provider, a security company said Wednesday. Gabby.a, a worm very much like the Kelvir family that's been knocking at Microsoft's instant messaging network (and actually knocked the Microsoft-based Reuters messaging service offline for a day two weeks ago), had been spreading through AOL's IM users.

With the help of IMLogic's Threat Center, the malicious code was detected; AOL then blocked further propagation at its servers.

The number of new viruses has almost tripled in the last six months, an anti-virus vendor said Tuesday, the spike fed by hackers releasing scads of variants to overwhelm defenses.

According to Panda Software, which is headquartered in Spain but has U.S. offices in Glendale, Calif., the count of new viruses has increased 278 percent since the third quarter of 2004.

A hacker has created a virus that targets music lovers by deleting MP3 files on infected computers, according to antivirus company Sophos.

The worm, dubbed Nopir.B, spreads over peer-to-peer networks and appears to have originated in France, security researchers at Sophos said Friday.

The recent discovery of a large number of malicious mobile phone programs should raise concerns throughout the wireless industry, according to a virus tracker.

Mobile phone antivirus software company SimWorks reported Wednesday that 52 new Trojan horses are hidden inside several different mobile phones games and other readily available mobile phone software. While the software appears to be safe to share or use, the Trojans actually contain malicious software that crashes many critical mobile phone system components.