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Sober Worm Continues Attack

Sober.p, the worm that stormed the Internet Monday, showed no signs of fading away as of Thursday morning, an anti-virus vendor said.
"It's had quite the impact," said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos. "Although it's not on the level of a really major worm, like Sobig of last year, Sober is the biggest we've seen so far this year."

The worm broke Monday and quickly gained steam in Western Europe before hitting American PCs. Within hours it dominated the malware charts by making up 70 percent or more of the malicious code traffic spotted by anti-virus monitoring stations.

Contrary to some analysts' expectations, Sober hasn't yet slowed. It's been spotted in 40 countries so far, said Cluley, and currently accounts for 79.6 percent of all worms and viruses making the rounds.

"Sober is very much hanging in there," said Cluley. "Right now, it's accounting for 5.3 percent of all e-mail, legitimate or otherwise. Over 1 in 20 e-mails, in other words, is Sober. That's ferocious."

While the worm doesn't carry a malicious payload as such -- no backdoor Trojan, no keylogger, no ability to turn the infected PC into a spam-spewing proxy -- it's slowed down e-mail traffic and clogged users' inboxes around the world.

"At this point," said Cluley, "it's actually less of a virus problem and more of a spam problem. Copies of Sober are making up a significant portion of all e-mail, and an even greater percentage of spam."