Sober Attack Biggest Virus Outbreak Ever

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December 01, 2005 (12:34 PM EST)

By Gregg Keizer , TechWeb Technology News

Apparently, messages from the FBI and CIA are the way to spread worms, a security firm said Thursday as it tallied up Sober's wildfire spread during November and concluded that the outbreak was the biggest ever.

E-mail security provider Postini said that it had quarantined more than 218 million Sober-infected messages in the last seven days, more than four times the 50 million-message average that it blocks in a run-of-the-mill month.

"This Sober generated close to a 1,500 percent increase in virus-infected e-mail traffic in the past week,” said Scott Petry, vice president of products and engineering at Postini, in a statement.

Petry also said that Sober's attack was twice as large as the largest previous on Postini's records.

Other security vendors took note of the recent Sober--the variant is dubbed Sober.x, Sober.y, or Sober.z by most anti-virus firms--and its impact during November. Both Sophos and Fortinet, for instance, had the new Sober at the top of their November charts.

According to Sophos, Sober.z (its designation for the worm) accounted for a whopping 43 percent of all malicious code detected during the month, even though the worm debuted only last week. Fortinet tagged it as accounting for 25 percent of the malware it blocked.

At the peak of the outbreak, one in every 13 e-mails was a Sober-infected message, said Sophos.

"The Sober family may seem as hard to exterminate as a colony of cockroaches," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant for Sophos, in a statement. "[But] mocking the feds is a sure-fire way of goading the authorities, and you can't help but wonder whether the author is desperate to be caught."

Sober spread in messages purportedly from the FBI, CIA, and other governments' law enforcement agencies, as well as in messages promising video clips of socialite Paris Hilton.