There’s talk of several new viruses out there which can do some serious damage. Here are a couple, in brief:
- MyDoom (sometimes known as Novarg and as a variant of the Mimail virus) has a random subject lines such as “Mail Delivery System,” “Test” or “Mail Transaction Failed” and contains an executable file and a statement such as: “The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment.” CNET quotes Vincent Gullotto, of Network Associates as saying “It’s huge. We have it as a high-risk outbreak.”
- Dumaru has the subject line ‘Important message for you. Read it immediately!’ and may be from someone with an email address that contains expletives (a dead giveaway, unless those are the kind of friends you have). Sophos says the worm poses as an emailed photograph, whilst really attempting to steal online banking details in the background. This is done by something called key-logging — the worm will load software which can capture your keystrokes and send them to the ne’er-do-well so they can access your bank account.
Wayne Rash of InfoWorld, writing last week of the arrival of a worm called Bagle, reckons this kind of outbreak is closely related to college terms. “The worms of summer tapered off as fall progressed,” he says. “By November, things were very quiet. Students were working hard on exams, I guess, and didn’t have time for worm-writing. But now that they’ve been away from the book-learning for a while, we’ve got the first significant worm of ’04.”