Sober worm stalls MSN, Hotmail

The pesky Sober worm is to blame for disrupting e-mail traffic between Comcast account holders and users of Microsoft-based e-mail, Redmond said on Friday.

A variant of Sober known as Win32/Sober.Z@mm is pummeling servers at Hotmail and MSN with "unusually high mail load," causing delays in e-mail delivery to Hotmail and MSN customers, said Brooke Richardson, MSN's lead product manager. Richardson also indicated that Internet service providers besides Comcast may be having problems directing e-mail to Hotmail and MSN servers.

"We are working with Comcast and other ISPs to address (the) issues," Richardson said. "We're actively working to take the appropriate steps to remedy the situation as rapidly as possible. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience."

Blog reports say that some Comcast subscribers, when sending e-mail to a Hotmail or MSN account, have received an error message saying their message was not received. However, Microsoft says that all e-mails, while some may be delayed, are eventually getting through.

A Microsoft spokesperson other than Richardson said that the problem began earlier this week but would not give a timetable for when it might be fixed.

The Sober worm first appeared in 2003 and can hijack a Windows-based computer and force it to repeatedly send spam e-mails. The continuous e-mailing can lead to overloaded servers and reduced network performance. Last month, a variant of the Sober worm was spread as an attachment that claimed to be an old class photo sent by a schoolmate.

[hadaso]

The first time it's actually annoying!

This is the first time I see an email worm that's actually annoying!

I get loads of virus notifications about infected email that has been blocked. "Received" headers in the email shows that they all come from the same PC on broadband located in Zurich, Switzerland, but there's nothing I can do about it.

And I get tons of "Delivery failure" notifications about email sent with one of my email addresses as the "sender"'s address (that of course I haven't sent, but lots of email providers don't do the decent thing which is scanning the email for known email worms and silently discarding it when the email is found to be one sent by a self propagating worm. There's no need for a flood of bounces to the wrong email address in such cases. Most of the email traffic related by the Sober worm is not created by the worm but by the way email providers handle it. For me it's all virus notifications and email bounces, and I don't have the worm, never was infected by any serious virus, and never sent out any virus-laden message!).

[tinytee99]

Problem is over three weeks old

Microsoft is lying about this problem just being noticied last week. I have AOL, and I know that I have not been able to receive messages from people that use MSN and hotmail for over a month. In fact I was so, upset that three weeks ago I got a refund for my MSN. I said I won't pay for a service that doesn't work.
It is very annoying if you are in business because people will say well I e-mailed you a few days ago and you never get it.

The other thing is that it took me two days of phoen calls before someone would admit that the problem was MSN and hotmail. I spent hours on the phone with AOL and MSN and finally someone at MSN, said yes they had a problem, with the servers talking to each other.

However, again that was over three weeks ago, so please realize that Microsoft is lying that this bug is a week old.

[Macsaresafer]

LOL!

The problem is well over 10 years old! Windows is the problem.
Another day another security issue. Big surprise.

[RichardET]

email bugs

I recall over the past 2-3 years that hotmail has many such issues.

[Bill Dautrive]

Hotmail is good for one thing

A spam and virus depository. Hotmail accounts are good for signing up where you might suspect the site will spam you to death or sell your email address.

That is what I do and my regular email(not the buggy and insecure hotmail) is virtually spam free as a result.