Sober.Q spreads hate messages in German, English

A new variant of the Sober virus appeared over the weekend, spreading right-wing messages in German and English.

Security companies are warning that they received hundreds of thousands of e-mails generated by Sober.Q in its first 24 hours.

Sober is usually a mass-mailing worm that sends a copy of itself to e-mail addresses stored on an infected computer's hard drive. However, during the same week that Germany and Europe celebrated the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the latest variant's sole purpose seemed to be to distribute hate mail.

Scott Chasin, chief technology officer at e-mail security specialist MX Logic, said the latest variant of Sober was being uploaded to computers infected by previous variants of Sober, which means the virus authors may have remote control over thousands of PCs.

"Sober.Q appears to be downloaded by machines infected by Sober.P," Chasin said. "If this is the case, the Sober.P author or authors could have remote command-and-control capabilities over a large network of infected machines. This network would provide not only a megaphone to distribute messages of hate, but a platform for future spam, worm and denial-of-service attacks."

Although spam usually tries to advertise products, Chasin said it is now also being used for spreading propaganda.

"Spam has been traditionally regarded as annoying messages that promote Viagra, porn and low-cost mortgages," Chasin said. "But for the past year, we have seen a trend in which worm authors are using spam not to hawk goods, but as a tool for political propaganda."

Last week, antivirus companies warned that the previous Sober variant, which was disguised as tickets to the Soccer World Cup in 2006, had suddenly modified its behavior and stopped propagating. The temporary lull in activity seemed to have been planned by the virus writers in preparation for this latest attack.

MX Logic's threat center has reported seeing more than 125,000 instances of the Sober.Q worm. The company categorized it as a threat with high severity.

Internet security specialist SurfControl reported seeing 1,000 spam e-mails within hours of the initial outbreak. That's about 40 times the usual number, according to the company.

[pegc]

Rightwing = hate?

I'm rightwing and there's no hatred involved. You article is biased and bigoted in its knee-jerk simplistic title. My company's intranet has linked it and a number of us are deeply offended. I'm going to make sure I unsubscribe from any and all newsletters I still receive from C/Net. Shame on all of you.

[br77575]

Re: Rightwing = hate?

The far-right neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) should not be confused with liberal and conservative politics in the USA. Do a Google search for "Right-Wing German? and you will find that CNET should have been more specific.

Polical bias

Please just report the news and leave the lefty bias at home. We get enough of that from Dan Rather and Newsweek.

[ebrandel]

You guys auditioning for Newsweek?

Try keeping your bias out of the news stories. When it shows up it only serves as a detriment to cnet's credibility.

[Darryl Snortberry]

Right Wing, Left Wing

It doesn't matter. One country "right wing" is another country "left wing". It just a label. Unfortunately most of the sheep in the US fall for it.

[My-Self]

bias ?

If the next batch of trojan sent political spam is promoting left wing stuff with the same magnitude and C-Net choose not to cover it, then you'll be able to say it's biased.

If this particular trojan spews right wing stuff, reporting it as such should not be considered offensive, at least until Donald Rumsfeld's words "People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be careful about what they do." gets slipped in the next spending bill and becomes (censorship) law ...

I Think You missed the point

People are complaining about the bias in this and similar stories at other venues because of something that is not stated in this story. The spam being generated by the Sober virus in Germany is in support of the German NDP and other neo-nazi organizations and idiologies.

Unless one believes that everyone to the right of Ted Kennedy is a Hitler supporter, such tripe should properly be labeled "neo-nazi" so as not to slander all conservatives.

The political opposite of this approach would exist if the propaganda distributed via this spam celebrated Stalin's post-war reign, or grieved the loss of the East German state, or celebrated the Bader-Meinhof Gang of the 60's. Most of us to the right of Teddy can't conceive of many journalists who would characterize such stuff as "left-wing propaganda". It would no doubt be labeled "Pro,or Neo Communist propaganda", as the current garbage should properly be called "neo-nazi".

[plmal]

German Spam

Since last weekend I have been swamped with German spam...what we need are something equal to the WWII flying fortresses to take care of spam....

[Vinman]

RE: German Spam

My Yahoo email account has been slammed with this German spam attack. I do not have pop access to this email account, so I have reason to believe (as well as no virus' have been detected during virus scans) that my pc is infected. I just wonder how long this is going to keep up. I can only block a limited number of messages on Yahoo and apparently Yahoo is in no hurry to try to resolve this issue or determine a fix to at least limit this. I must admit, however, that it does go to my bulk folder. But sometimes legitimate e-mail does get directed there. Also, the address blocker for Yahoo does not appear to accept the use of the asterisk (*) wildcard and there are some ISP's that I do not want to block entirely as I know people who have e-mail adsresses at those ISP's. Again, I wonder how long this is going to last? :-S