The latest version of the Sober worm, Sober.Q, used to send hate mail messages has seemingly been stopped. German security researchers claim that the Sober worm was preparing to go dormant on Monday and restart its activities on Thursday. However, the researchers were able to shut down websites that were feeding the worm code, stopping it from receiving its new instructions. However, it remains to be seen if this will suffice in dealing with this threat.

The worm may reside on thousands of PCs worldwide, and on Thursday it may again try to send messages from those compromised machines.

The nuisance worm affects PCs running the Windows operating system, from Windows 95 through Server 2003. Security experts advise users to update antivirus software regularly.