New Bagle variant causes net chaos
1 November 2004
A new virus disguised as a joke is reportedly spreading quickly across the internet.
Anti-virus firms are issuing high-level warnings about the new virus, a variant of the Bagle email program.
The Windows virus grabs email addresses from Microsoft Outlook and uses its own mail sending software to spread itself to new victims
The virus turns off the firewall and security measures in infected PCs and can strike computers running Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP.
The variant also carries a backdoor that will allow other malicious files to be executed on an infected computer and has been labelled a medium to high security threat.
The new variant is called Bagle.AT, Bagle.BB and Bagle.AU and contains an attachment, in either COM, EXE, or SCR format, bearing the virus code labelled either "joke" or "price". The subject line reportedly reads Re:,; Re: Hello; Re: Hi; Re: Thank you!; or Re: Thanks :), while body of the email usually contains nothing but a smiley or emoticon.
Users will only usually become infected if they open the attachment that accompanies the email.
Another email worm currently doing the rounds is a DOS attack against Google, Microsoft and the Hungarian Prime Minister's website. The worm, called Zafi-C, is categorised a low risk threat, and all seem to only affect computers running the Windows operating system.
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