Sober Strikes Again and Again

No matter what security companies come up with, the Sober worm just won't back down and go away. All experts seem to be able to do is shrug and publish the updated Sober signatures. Specialists have however managed to find that a new outbreak of Sober may be coming in spite of the fact that the last wave of Sober infections is still a problem in many countries.

The new series of attacks sets infected computers to download instructions and afterwards sends the infected emails to new addresses. According to the iDefense security company, the new wave of Sober e-mails is supposed to hit on Jan. 5. Theoretically, that means users have a whole month ahead to prepare for the attack, but that doesn't mean we'll get away easily with this. People still remain indifferent to all warnings, no matter how critical they are and without the proper precautions, Sober will probably paralyze email servers once more.

If Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer at Finnish antivirus company F-Secure, is right, the possible attack could be stopped even before making any victims. The worm is set to download instructions from a number of sites hosted on the systems of free Web space providers. These are located mostly in Germany and Austria, he said, and the free websites should be able to block those specific URLs this virus is trying to download.