Free Republic

Special to CNET News.com Computer security experts fear a new worm that began spreading rapidly across Australian e-mail networks on Sunday could be a rehearsal for a more concerted attack in coming weeks. The worm--dubbed Bagle-A--carries an expiration date, possibly indicating that more robust versions of the worm could be slated for release soon, said Daniel Zatz, security director for Computer Associates Australia. While Bagle-A is already successful--responsible for an 80 percent increase in queries to CA's help desk and in virus submissions to rival computer security company Sophos--the current version of the worm contains bugs, Zatz said. Comparing Bagle...

Blaster, Slammer, Sobig, Lovsan - if these words are familiar to you, you might have been one of this year's victims of various and vicious PC security attacks. Just Friday, appropriately enough on Halloween, yet another monster reared its ugly head as computer security experts warned of a potentially troublesome new e-mail worm, Mimail.C, slowly spreading among both corporate and home e-mail users. This latest threat is a variant of the W32.Mimail worm that surfaced in August and comes as an e-mail message with "our private photos" in the subject line and an attached .zip archive file called "photos.zip." Infection...

Worm Suspect Said Just a Normal, Fun-Loving Teen Sat Aug 30, 6:28 PM ET By Todd Melby HOPKINS, Minn. (Reuters) - A friend of a Minnesota high school student charged with unleashing a new strain of the Blaster Internet worm that infected computers around the world described him on Saturday as "just a kid" who is likely innocent. Mike Heldt, who once worked with suspect Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, at a local movie theater, told Reuters he and Parson like to shoot billiards, rent movies, play video games and "just sit around and joke like other kids." "I don't think...

Gates blames SoBig on customer updating process DETROIT, Michigan (AP) -- Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, known for helping to make the computer a common tool, said Thursday that new breakthroughs in information technology are on the horizon despite the economic difficulties facing the industry. "It's an exciting time to be involved in digital software," Gates said during a speech to the Detroit Economic Club at the Cobo Center. "The same kind of excitement I had when I started Microsoft at age 17 I still have today." Gates envisions that by the end of the decade people no longer will need...

<p>It turns out that SoBig.F is even less original than previously thought.</p> <p>The self-updating capability that had anti-virus experts, users and even the FBI scrambling this weekend was in fact present in some of the earlier versions of the virus, albeit in a somewhat less advanced form.</p>

The fastest spreading Internet virus in history, one that experts feared would paralyse the Internet in an attack scheduled for yesterday afternoon, originated on the personal computer of an unwitting user in B.C., authorities said last night. The "Sobig" worm, which fizzled yesterday when the 'trojan horse'-type program did nothing more than direct users to an Internet porn site, has bombarded computers with almost 100 million junk messages since Tuesday. The worm ordered infected Windows machines to download a mysterious program yesterday at 3 p.m. Even at the cusp of the hour, experts remained in the dark as to the...

Parasoft CEO Blames SoBig On Arrogant Software Industry Leadership August 22, 2003 (3:29 p.m. EST) By Keith Ferrell , TechWeb News Sharply criticizing complacency, arrogance and immaturity in software industry leadership, and blaming those qualities for the SoBig virus's successful march through the world's computers, Parasoft CEO Adam Kolawa delivered a rant Friday that included an offer to show the industry how to cure its errors. The head of the privately held software development solutions company said that the industry's policy of tackling program bugs at the latter stages of development cycles is self-defeating. By that point in the development...

<p>The FBI yesterday subpoenaed an Arizona Internet service provider to trace the culprit behind a fast-spreading e-mail virus.</p> <p>Meanwhile, a feared Internet attack resulting from the virus fizzled yesterday, as security experts said they contained it by identifying and blocking computers key to coordinating it.</p>

Beijing: The Sobig.F worm may have attacked 30 percent of China's poorly protected Internet users, wreaking havoc on more than 20 million computers, business executives and officials said Saturday. China's growing online population has been an easy prey to the virus, which has exploited a low level of awareness and a widespread absence of efficient anti-virus software to infect computers across the country, they said. "We've never seen anything like it," said Hao Ting, a spokeswoman for Beijing Rising Technology, an Internet security company. "People, who may not be totally aware of the danger, simply open their email and...

FBI and Department of Homeland Security investigators have tracked the source of the fast-moving Sobig virus and are working with Internet service providers to try to stop the next phase in the virus's attack, which was expected to begin at 3 p.m. Eastern Time Friday afternoon. The FBI has served a grand jury subpoena on Easynews.com, a Phoenix-based Internet service provider that provides access to "Usenet," a worldwide online bulletin board system. According to a source with knowledge of the investigation's focus, the person or persons who released the latest version of Sobig used an Easynews.com account to release the...

NEW YORK -- New York Times Co. (NYT) says it has shut down computer systems at its Manhattan headquarters, potentially making the newspaper publisher a high-profile victim of computer viruses that are ravaging corporate networks across the U.S. Toby Usnik, a Times spokesman, said he didn't know the cause of the problem, which hit the company at around noon EDT Friday. Employees, including the paper's reporters and editors, were instructed within an hour to turn off their PCs. Mr. Usnik said the publisher plans to publish a paper tomorrow, possibly using backup systems. A number of rogue computer programs have...

Several Internet worms that have besieged computers for over a week played havoc again, including one called Sobig.F, whose aim was to turn PCs into spam machines and was believed to be the fastest-growing virus ever, experts said. Sobig.F drops software onto infected Windows computers that open them to be used later for distributing Internet spam -- unwanted e-mails and product promotions, experts said. It also represents a new trend in converging e-mail spamming and virus software writing, they said. "We believe [Sobig.F] has been written by a spammer or spammers" looking for ways to get past spam filters,...

NEW YORK (AP)—A virus that debuted this week has been declared the fastest spreading e-mail plague of all time, while another malicious program that hit last week continued to disrupt computers worldwide. MessageLabs Inc., a company that filters e-mail for corporate clients around the world, Wednesday said it had intercepted more than a million copies of the "Sobig.F" virus the previous day, the most it has ever intercepted in a single day. That was one in every 17 e-mail messages the firm scanned. "That's just a number we've never seen before," said Brian Czarny, MessageLabs' marketing director. The most...

If you are on a mailing list for any Israeli news service, you are at risk for receiving the W32.sobig.E@mm mass-mailing virus. I must have received this virus at least a dozen times this week, all from sources purporting to be "israelnationalnews.com" "jpost.com" "koshertoday.com" The subject header is something like "Re: Your Applications" and the email contains an attachment called "your_details.zip" or "application.zip" THIS IS THE VIRUS. Fortunately Symantec detected and deleted the virus (which I verified from reading the logfiles). If you feel that you have opened this virus and infected your system Symantec has a tool for its...

The latest version of the Sobig worm is making its way through computer networks around the world, apparently causing no direct damage but hogging bandwidth and IT resources in its path. The new worm, called W32.Sobig.E@MM, has been showing up around the globe since yesterday, according to Graham Cluley, senior technical consultant for antivirus software vendor Sophos PLC in Oxford, England. So far, it's only annoying, but it could be a precursor to more serious and damaging attacks, he said. The worm affects network PCs that run the Windows 95/98/Me and Windows NT/2000 operating systems, according to Sophos. It spreads...

Yet another variant of the Sobig worm has been detected by security firms, including MessageLabs, Network Associates, and Symantec. And although the new worm is spreading slowly at the moment, if past trends prove true, users should be on the alert. Sobig.d, which was first spotted Wednesday, is the latest in a line of fast-spreading worms which include self-timed deactivation code that ultimately renders them impotent. Sobig.d will not propagate after July 1. The previous version, Sobig.c, turned itself off on June 8. Like its earlier incarnations, Sobig spreads via a network or through E-mail: the latter spoofs a sending...