So many viruses everywhere
By MIKE BERMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
November 05, 2003

I finally felt safe and comfy that I managed to avoid - or blast to hell - all the variants of the Sobig worm. Then I received a notification from the folks at Symantec Corp. that another scourge has hit the Net.

Known as W32.Mimail.C, this new threat resembles Sobig in that it spreads by e-mail and steals data from infected computers and sends it to "predetermined e-mail addresses." It, of course, only affects computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems, again sparing those who have moved on to Macintosh or Linux-based computers.

Apparently the deviant (or deviants) that released this try to lure you into opening their e-mails by enticing you with the promise of "private photos" with "Re (2): our private photos" and then a string of random letters in the subject line. The e-mail also contains a file called photos.zip.

According to the folks at Symantec, this new virus eats its way into your system by adding a line to your registry, collects all the e-mail addresses into a single file, checks for a valid Internet connection, captures text and sends it to predetermined e-mail addresses. It then checks for - and acquires - e-mail servers associated with particular domain names and contacts those servers via e-mail with your name and e-mail address in the "From" field.

The end result? It performs a "denial of service" (DoS) attack on infected machines, selecting a site such as darkprofits.net. Each DoS routine, according to Symantec, is designed to have 15 attacking threads active at any moment, with each thread performing one TCP connection or ICMP attack, then sleeping for five seconds.

The list goes, on and on and on.

Of course this emphasizes the necessity for all of us to make sure our anti-virus software is active and up-to-date.

Now, in case this hasn't caused you to disconnect your modem and hide in the closet, a notification from the folks at www.networkcomputing.com informs us that Microsoft has re-released a series of patches "relating to its recent onslaught of security advisories."

They advise Windows users to reinstall these patches and to keep an eye on Microsoft's Web site to "catch any further patch regression problems and re-releases."

They add that Mac OS X users also "get to play the patch your system game" due to the announcement of many system vulnerabilities.

They suggest a visit to http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/ntbugtraq/ for a list of problems linked to Mac, Windows, Linux and other operating systems.

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