May 03, 2005

Sober. P worm spreads

Experts at London's Sophos computer security firm have warned users about a new variant of the Sober worm purporting to be an email from the soccer world governing body FIFA offering free tickets to the 2006 World Cup in Germany. In the last 24 hours the W32/Sober-N worm raced to the top of the most widespread virus chart, accounting for 62% of all viruses seen by Sophos' monitoring stations around the world.

Sober.P, like other Sober worms, uses a subject header in an e-mail to try to entice people into opening an attachment. When a user opens the attached file they will become infected by the worm, and it will mass-mail itself to other email addresses found on the infected PC.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos said,

"Many people will be eager to attend one of the biggest sporting events in the world next year, and may think its worth the risk of opening the email attachment just in case the prize is for real. Computer users who don't practise safe computing will feel as sick as a parrot, and will only be passing this worm onto other unsuspecting victims."

The variant has been compressed to make it difficult for security software to identify when scanning a system

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