WHFI_Beth Site Admin
Joined: 29 Sep 2004 Posts: 159
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Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 9:01 pm Post subject: Spam and German Emails |
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Email users questioning German-language spam waiting in their inboxes on Monday morning is being caused by 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 websites with right-wing German nationalistic content, according to an advisory from Email security company MX Logic. One of the URLs points to the website of the right-wing German NPD party, MX Logic says.
The security firm said that it had seen over 125,000 instances of Sober.q overnight Saturday and into Sunday, and labelled it as a high severity threat. The variant is downloaded by computers already infected by the Sober.p worm which began circulating earlier this month, MX Logic says. The virus writers appear to have remote control over the Sober.p infected machines, giving them a network from which to launch future spam and denial of service attacks, it adds.
The latest sober variant is one of a relatively new type of "propaganda spam", meant to spread political messages rather than sell a product or service, MX Logic says. Circulation of the worm coincides with ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe and examples of subject lines it sends include "Dresden 1945" and "Du wirst zum Sklaven gemacht!!!" ("You are made slaves!!!"), according to MX Logic. |
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