Sober worm spreading like wildfire

TechWhack | May 5 2005

Sophos Antivirus Company has claimed that the latest variant of the Sober worm has spread so fast and on a mass scale, that it formed almost 4% of all email traffic in the last couple of hours. In other words, one in every 22 mails being circulated on the net consisted of a copy of the worm, which has become a nuisance for every antivirus company on the planet.

The virus has been reported in around 40 countries until now and has spread around quiet fast. It first made news on Monday and within 4 days; it has become a mass scale devastation machine. In fact, Sophos has already said that the worm now accounts for almost 79 percent of all viruses they are getting alerts for.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos said in a statement: “It’s still very widespread. It appears to turn off Symantec’s antivirus protection and the Windows XP firewall. It seems to do that to set up future attacks.” They also predicted that the worm is going to use the infected machines for a mass level DDoS attacks, which we would be noticing quite soon.

The worm has been codenamed as Sober.P, Sober.N, Sober.O, or Sober.S by the different companies and travels around through email attachments with messages written in English and German. It lures the customer into clicking on the attachment to receive free tickets to the upcoming World Cup Soccer event in 2006 due to take place in Germany. Europe is being targeted specifically considering Soccer is a craze in this continent.