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Sobering Up The FBI, CIA
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-11-28
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Last week, new variants on the Sober computer virus began to spread. The variants, Sober X, Y and Z spread in a new and dastardly manner, posing as emails from the CIA and the FBI. Both government agencies posted notices on their websites saying they don't send out unsolicited emails. This hasn't stopped this email and it's attachment from being successful.
Cyber security firm MessageLabs reported last week they stopped over 2.7 million copies of the new virus. MessageLabs said they first spotted the virus on November 21st. They also said the size of this attacks suggests this is a major offensive, "certainly one of the largest in recent months."
Postini, a firm specializing in integrated message management claims to have stopped over 7 million of these bogus emails in the first 24 hours alone.
"Our customers have not been affected by the Sober virus, and despite the outbreak of this new variation, they have experienced no latency issues or any degradation of service," said Scott Petry, founder and vice president of products and engineering at Postini.
"It's business as usual at Postini as we continue to process hundreds of millions of emails daily. We're quarantining all security threats before they enter customers' networks and blocking them before they reach email recipients."
When someone receives an email, it looks like it's from either the CIA or the FBI. It informs the recipient that one of the two organizations has been monitoring the activities of said user and that they've been visiting illegal websites. It invites them to answer a few questions in the attached document (the virus). Users open the attachment and voila!
The emails were also sent to those in German domains. Those domains end either in the DE or AT. Both the CIA and FBI as well as most security companies emphasize the best way to avoid this problem is really pretty simple: Just don't open the attachment.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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