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Sober worm huge!

By Derek Sooman

On May 5, 2005, 5:50 AM

Seemingly, one in every 22 emails moving around cyberspace right now is infected with the latest version of the Sober worm. Research from UK antivirus company Sophos has made the claim that this mass-mailing worm is so huge that it now accounts for about 79 per cent of all viruses the company is seeing. Recently, we reported that the worm was getting spread by means of an e-mail offering free tickets to the 2006 World Cup. Using the kinds of technologies employed to send out spam, Sober spreading e-mails are apparently all over the place.

"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." - Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

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User Comments: 3

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  1. But it does nothing but sends itself to others?
  2. Whether that's true or not (and who knows all that these kinds of things really do, we probably only get to know about the major functions...) is makes no difference.This crap is clogging up mail servers all over the place. It accounts for one in 22 e-mails - that's AWFUL!. Think of the wasted bandwidth, wasted computing resources. This is terrible. Someone needs to stop these things, and stop them dead. Not just the viral infection of machines - we need to catch the people doing this and bring them to justice. This isn't hacking. This isn't good. Its evil, and it needs to be stopped.[Edited by phantasm66 on 2005-05-05 09:28:27]
  3. unfortunately there isnt a whole lot people can do about it other than attempt to block it at the mail server level and be sure antivirus is fully functional. using a personal firewall other than windows firewall would help of course, but how many average computer users actually know what a firewall is?

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