Sober mass-mailer worm
Published November 24th, 2005
Austria’s equivalent to the FBI is investigating a flurry of similar bogus e-mails sent in its name to people in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the Associated Press reported.”This particular virus is a mass-mailer worm and is the largest one we have seen this year,” said Alfred A. Huger, senior director of engineering at Symantec Corp., which sells Norton AntiVirus software. “It’s as bad as it gets. With this particular type of virus on your system, there is a high probability that your personal information will be stolen.”Craig Schmugar, a virus-research manager at McAfee Inc.’s Avert Labs, said his company, which also makes anti-virus software, had logged more than 73,000 consumer computers reporting detection since the worm was discovered Monday.British e-mail security company MessageLabs Ltd. said it has intercepted more than 2.7 million copies of Sober and its variants, noting that “the size of the attack indicates that this is a major offensive, certainly one of the largest in the last few months.”
Sober is known to affect only those computers running the Windows operating system. It appears that Apple and Linux computer users were not affected.
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