Alert level raised on latest sober mutant

Security experts today warned of a newly discovered variant of the Sober worm that is spreading using a relatively sophisticated social engineering attack.

The Sober N worm arrives as a ZIP file attachment in an email in either English or German. The email claims that the sender has been receiving your emails and has enclosed 10 in a file for your attention.

"The new Sober variant has been seeded last night," said Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research at F-Secure.

"Spreading speed is unknown at this time, but many previous Sober variants have been fairly big problems."

His company has raised the threat level of the worm to its second highest setting and is urging all users to update their antivirus software.

Once activated the worm harvests email addresses and sends itself onwards.

The first Sober worm was detected in 2003 and since then many variants have been spawned after easy to use virus creation kits for the virus started to appear on the internet.

Its variants went on to top the infection charts regularly in 2003 and 2004.

See also:

Latest Sober mutant targets soccer fans

Promise of World Cup tickets hides deadly payload  03 May 2005

Mutant Sober worm spreading fast

Security firm intercepts 1,400 copies of latest mass-mailer variant  21 Feb 2005

Sober worm about to cause major hangover

Latest variant begins the rounds  19 Nov 2004

Sober variant set to cause trouble

Heightened risk assessment for Sober.f strain spotted in the wild  05 Apr 2004

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