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German Spam Worm Floods Email Inboxes
During the last two days I've received a flood of messages in German that were somewhat bewildering. I assumed they were spam and found the explanation in today's news:
E-mail users perplexed by the barrage of German-language spam waiting in their inboxes Monday morning can point the finger of blame at the latest version of the Sober mass mailing worm which began rapidly spreading over the weekend.Sober.q uses both German and English-language messages to direct recipients to Web sites with right-wing German nationalistic content, according to an advisory from e-mail security company MX Logic. One of the URLs points to the Web site of the right-wing German NPD party, it says.
Update:
Alfred Huger, an expert at Symantec Corp, estimated that Sober-Q had generated "tens of millions" of spam messages. Each infected machine is probably capable of sending out 10,000 spams per hour. [more]
German neo-Nazis are using the spam emails to entice the unsuspecting to racist websites. The attacks coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and with elections in Germany.
However, information officials said anti-virus systems are doing a good job blocking or quarantining the spam. [more]
Sober.P email worm was found on May 2nd, 2005. It sends itself as an attachment in e-mail messages with English or German texts. F-Secure provides a simple disinfection utility to eliminate Sober.P worm infection.
Sober.Q was found on May 14th, 2005. This Sober variant doesn't spread itself in e-mails. Instead, it mass-mails political statements. Sober.Q is installed to computers infected by Sober.P.
Sober.Q is written in Visual Basic. Its file is a PE executable about 54 kilobytes long, packed with modified UPX file compressor. Sober.Q has its own SMTP engine.
Posted by tim at May 16, 2005 7:13 AM
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