New variation of Sober virus coming in January
Now, we seem to be getting “coming attractions” previews in virus-land…. Anyway, I’ve read at several sources that we are to expect a new variation on the sober worm around January 5th, 2006. It’s said that the date was chosen to mark the formation of the Nazi Party. In the past, variants have spouted pro-nazi sentiments and redirected users to pro-nazi web sites.
Recently Sober variants got the media name of the fbi/cia virus as one vehicle for setting up a mass mailing network to spout the pro-nazi propaganda emails.
Now, one of the running questions would be, “if they can predict it’s coming, can’t they do something?” It looks as though an analysis of the code has discovered that a new set of instructions is scheduled to be downloaded from certain web servers on January 5th, that’s how they know something’s coming. The encryption code that protected the list of sites has also been broken, so they know where the donwloads are expected to come from, many are not yet active.
They’re hoping with law enforcement attention AND a good list of where the bug is to be downloaded from, they’ll be able to prevent this from being a big event. Sounds promising. A publicly available list of suspect sites might be nice, so that network administrators could selectively blacklist the suspects pre-emptively.