DANGER WILL ROBINSON! next wave has begun

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If you get an email that says Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available. or Hi or Test or ANYTHING that has an attachment that is a .zip file, DO NOT OPEN IT, DO NOT RUN IT, DO NOT SAVE IT!

New, Fast-Spreading Worm Unleashed

ReprintedFrom:

JAN 27, 2004 ARTICLE ID: 3274 by Joris Evers A new e-mail worm is spreading rapidly on the Internet, clogging e-mail servers and staging an attack on the Web site of Unix vendor The SCO Group Inc., antivirus software vendors said.

The worm surfaced Monday and has been given several names by antivirus software vendors, including Mydoom, Novarg, and Mimail.R. Experts don't all agree on the worm's payload, but they do agree that it is spreading faster than Sobig-F, the worm that topped the charts for the most widespread e-mail worm last year.

"It has been moving very quickly for the past three hours and has been generating a hell of a lot of e-mail," said one security expert Monday afternoon. Some businesses have shut down their e-mail gateways to block the worm, he said.

This worm has taken off like a rocket, with well over 20,000 interceptions within just two hours of it being discovered, Ken Dunham, director of malicious code at Internet security company iDefense Inc., said in a statement via e-mail.

Massive spreading of the worm slowed down performance of the top 40 U.S. business Web sites Monday afternoon, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, California-based Web performance monitoring firm. The average time for a site to load exceeded four seconds, while they normally load in two to three seconds, Keynote said in a statement.

The worm arrives as an e-mail with an attachment that can have various names and extensions, including .exe, .scr, .zip or .pif. The e-mail can have a variety of subject lines and body texts, but in many cases it will appear to be an error report stating that the message body can't be displayed and has instead been attached in a file, experts said.

The sender's address can be spoofed, meaning that the message could appear to be from a colleague, friend or the e-mail system administrator.