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Sober: Internet Enemy #1
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-12-02
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Tommy guns don't do a lot of good against this particular enemy. You can't put the light on ‘em, no good pigeons to squeal. Nope… this enemy spreads like a disease to unsuspecting victims under the guise of the CIA and FBI. The Sober virus has reached the upper echelons with hundreds of millions of these critters tagged and bagged. There's a lot more out there though.
Postini, a specialist in message management, said they've quarantined 29 million copies of the Sober virus in the last 24 hours and 218 million Sober infected messages in the last week. They said this outbreak was twice as large as the largest previous attack.
"We typically quarantine about 50 million virus-infected emails in a month. This Sober virus generated close to a 1500% increase in virus-infected email traffic in the past week," said Scott Petry, founder and senior vice president of products and engineering at Postini.
"Despite the virulence of the outbreak, our customers have not been affected by the Sober virus, and they experienced no message delivery latency issues or any degradation of service. We're blocking or quarantining all security threats before they reach our customers' networks."
The Sober viruses do two basic things. The first is the massive email onslaught. It sends out tons of emails, enough to slow down the internet and clog up servers. The other nasty trick is it disables antivirus software so it can't stop the onslaught.
The best way to avoid this mess is to delete the email. In the recent onslaught, the emails looked like they were from either the CIA or FBI and requesting people to open the attachment and take the questionnaire. If users open the file, that's all she wrote.
As Postini pointed out, a constant warning is out there, not to open unknown attachments, but unfortunately, many users do. This case stems from the fact that emails look authentic, at least in the addresses. Just remember the neither the FBI nor the CIA send out unsolicited emails.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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