As people return to work, some having enjoyed a long weekend thanks to the celebration of U.S. Independence Day, they may find a grim situation as
another new mass-mailing Internet worm spreads across networks worldwide.
Sydney Morning Herald (registration required)
A new internet virus is expected to clog mail servers, cause severe slowdown and wreak financial damage as it spreads rapidly around the world when
businesses return to work today. The mass-mailer worm, dubbed Evaman, was discovered only yesterday but is already being likened to the MyDoom worm
that cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in January.
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Symantec, a leading antivirus vendor, has given this new worm a "category 2" (Low) threat assessment, due primarily to its high distribution rather
than it destructiveness. The primary threat it poses stems from its potential to overwhelm networks with traffic as it attempts to spread.
Tim Hartman, senior technical director at the security firm Symantec, said Evaman had the potential to be "every bit as bad as MyDoom. It's
really shaping up like that."
He warned that messages carrying the virus would usually have subject headings like "failed transaction" and "failure delivery". The body of the
text would entice recipients with messages like: "This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. Delivery to last recipient failed.
Email returned as attachment text file."
Earlier this year the �MyDoom� worm threw business networks into chaos and causes massive problems across the Internet. Symantec rated �MyDoom� as a
Category 4 (Severe) threat, the next highest threat category possible.
As of this writing, other antivirus vendors have not made announcements concerning this new worm, but if it does break out such update should be
forthcoming.
Those who use Microsoft operating systems, including Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP
are at risk. Users of other operating systems like Linux and Macintosh are safe from this worm.
To avoid infection by this and most other mass-mailing worms, e-mail users should run an antivirus program with real-time protection, keep the
antivirus signatures up-to-date, never open e-mail attachments unless they are expecting them - then only after scanning them for infection- and never
run programs downloaded from the Internet before they have been scanned for viruses.
Related News Links
The Australian
Symantec on �Evaman�
Symantec on �MyDoom�
AVG Antivirus News
Trend Micro Virus Threats
Sophos Antivirus
[edit on 4-7-2004 by Spectre]