The newest variation of the Sober worm has spread rapidly across the Internet in the past 24 hours and now makes up two-thirds of virus traffic on the Internet, according to security experts.
Sober.P, first detected on this last Monday, now accounts for 77 percent of all viruses detected by Sophos's threat-monitoring stations worldwide. Kaspersky Lab, a Russian maker of antivirus software designed to combat such threats, described the worm's spread in Western Europe as an "epidemic."
Variants of Sober have been circulated since 2003 and have continued to hit corporate and home systems. The mass-mailing worm has continued to spread because people still open attachments in infected e-mail's, despite warnings.
The latest Sober offshoot uses an e-mail written in both English and German. One of its lures is a message saying the recipient has won free tickets to the 2006 World Cup soccer tournament. Once victims open the infected attachment, the virus harvests their e-mail addresses. The virus copies itself onto the user's computer and then sends a similar e-mail to the harvested addresses.
Free tickets to the World Cup won't thrill too many people in the US, so the spread of this Sober is not very big in this country. But, in Western Europe, its a different story. Soccer is almost a religion over there, hence the epidemic proportions of the infections can be traced to that area.
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