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| Virus Warnings / Patches |
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| From The Forum: SecurityWatch |
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Monday, September. 13, 2004 |
The latest MyDoom worm variant comes with a secret message from the authors; they are asking antivirus vendors for a job. No, I can’t think of a better way to search for jobs in the antivirus industry…
It’s been reported that both MyDoom.U and MyDoom.V both contain a potentially harmful email attachment that attempts to download a backdoor Trojan horse named Surila. Embedded into the code is a message to the antivirus industry, “We searching 4 work in AV industry.”
No one in the industry would “touch them with a bargepole”, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for antivirus firm Sophos.
"It's very simple--if you write a virus, we will never, ever employ you," he said in a statement. "Not only is it deeply unethical to write malicious code, but it raises issues as to whether you could ever be trusted to develop the software which protects millions of users around the world from attack every day."
"Virus writers don't care if their code crashes or causes incompatibilities--you don't have to be a genius to write a virus."
Attack Of The Talking Worm.
All right I know this sounds like a cheesy horror movie from the ‘50s, right? Actually a virus writer has released a worm that speaks to its victims. The new worm is spread by an email attachment entitled “Listen and Smile”.
The worm, named “Amus”, takes advantage of the Windows Speech Engine, embedded on Windows XP. The message it plays says: "How are you. I am back. My name is mister hamsi. I am seeing you. Haaaaaaaa. You must come to turkiye. I am cleaning your computer. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 0. Gule. Gule [bye bye]." Kind of an odd message isn’t it?
"It might be confusing to users because it says 'I am seeing you'," says Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research for F-Secure. "It's the only worm I have found speech on, but it is not too advanced because it is written in Visual Basic."
Amus, which goes into effect after the Windows XP boot-up music, begins to delete DLL and INI files causing Windows to fail. It’s been rated as a low threat by antivirus vendors.
Small Firms With e-Mail Services In Sight.
Today, McAfee unveiled a new security service designed to let smaller companies outsource their email security to the antivirus software maker.
Managed Mail Protection is a spam-filtering service that can detect and quarantine infected emails before even getting to the customers network. Subscribers can obtain detailed information on quarantined emails via Web-based management reports.
"The service is automated and transparent, so there is no need for additional management or personnel to monitor e-mail traffic," Steve Crutchfield, director of product marketing at McAfee, said in a statement. "This helps businesses save time and money on their IT security."
McAfee Might Be Heading To Court. Mark Griffiths, a Brisbane software developer, is considering a lawsuit against the antivirus company McAfee. His reasoning behind the potential lawsuit is McAfee wrongly identified his internet setup program, ISPWizard, as a Trojan in the most recent virus definition update.
Allan Bell, McAfee marketing director for Asia Pacific, said the company had released a new DAT file yesterday morning including changes that addressed Griffith’s problem.
"We do have a large database of known good files and programs that we scan against to make sure that there are no false positives. False positives happen in very rare occasions and so we want to encourage developers to talk to our support department about testing their programs," Bell said.
Enjoy!
Jeremy Muncy
+ The SecurityProNews Team
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