Hundreds of people wish me Happy New Year

Filed in archive Malware on January 2, 2007

My inbox has been full of New Year congrats for quite some time now. As I suspected, I didn't become wildly popular since last year, but it was the spam-virus campaign that was in its full blow over the last couple of days. Don't worry, I didn't get infected, not only because of my great and rational mind which doesn't let me open attachments to e-mails I did not expect to get, but my trusted Thunderbird also very cleverly put a (Spam?) in front of each and every subject line of this pests.

But, onto the spam spreading virus, here's what Information week says about it:

"The worm, dubbed "Tibs" by Kaspersky Lab but also known as a "Nuwar" variant (Trend Micro) and "Mixor.q" (Symantec), appears as a file attachment named "postcard.exe" in messages with "Happy New Year" subject headings. Users who launch the executable will infect their PCs with rootkits, keyloggers, and other malware."

Following the recent trend, this worm also has thousands of variants, one security expert counted 850 different ones in just five minutes, and spreads like plague using spam and armies of spam bots. This makes it extremely difficult for anti-virus vendors to issue effective definitions for their programs, so many users out there are left 'naked' with insufficient protection, even if they did pay for their anti-virus programs.

I don't know where this world is going to! I hate penis enlargement/diet pill/stock tip spam, but it all becomes even worse when the spam is combined with worms.