Received any emails lately marked “re:information” or “re: Wicked ScreenSaver”? Then chances are that you are one of the millions of email users who have been recipients of the Sobig virus. Do not open these emails and delte them immediately.
The Sobig virus is the largest email virus of all time and is spreading rapidly from inbox to inbox. A virus that debuted this week has been declared the fastest-spreading e-mail plague ever.
MessageLabs Inc., a company that filters e-mail for corporate clients around the world, said Wednesday it intercepted more than a million copies of the “Sobig.F” virus the previous day, the most ever in a single day. That was one in every 17 e-mail messages the firm scanned.
Another email security firm, Postini, announced that it quarantined 1,881,689 instances of the Sobig.F email virus for its customers yesterday and expects to block more than 3 million instances today. The Sobig.F has quickly become one of the most virulent email strains ever seen.
Here’s how the Sobig virus works:
1) The Sobig.F virus follows a common modus operandi for self-propagating viruses.
2) Sobig.F harvests destination email addresses from text files, email files, directory files and other places addresses exist.
3) Sobig.F includes its own SMTP engine to generate and mail outgoing email servers, and will send itself as an infected attachment to harvested email addresses. This model of distributed self-propagation maximizes the speed and breadth of the spreading infection.
The File Attachment:
Sobig.F arrives in an e-mail with an attachment that when opened infects the computer and sends itself on to other victims using a random e-mail address from the address book, making it difficult to trace the worm back to its source.
This attachment is a “ .pif “ file.
Additionally, the attachments’ names may include your_document.pif, details.pif, your_details.pif, thank_you.pif, movie0045.pif, document.Fall.pif, application.pif, and document.9446.pif. A .SRC attachment has been traced back to the Sobig virus too. If you receive any unwanted emails with attachments, delete them immediately.
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