New Sober Worm Spreading Quickly
A new version of the Sober worm wriggled out of its hole early on Monday and set about quickly attacking computers in Europe and the U.S., a security services company says. The worm is a mass-mailer, meaning it spreads itself via e-mail using contacts listed in the address books of computers it infects.
Source: PC WorldThe first instance of the worm, called W32.Sober-K-mm, was intercepted by U.K. security company MessageLabs. The company detected 663 instances of the worm in the first hour, and the figure climbed quickly to more than 2,200 instances over the next five to six hours, prompting MessageLabs to give it a high-risk rating, says Maksym Schipka, a senior antivirus researcher with the company.
"Compared to other Sober worms, it looks to me like this one is spreading itself more aggressively," he says.
The latest variant appears to have originated in Germany, and by midmorning on Monday it had also been detected in France, the U.K., and the U.S. It may have been created by the same hacker that wrote the first version of the Sober worm, which appeared in October 2003 and also originated in Germany, Schipka says.
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