Sober using 2006 World Cup as bait

The last 24 hours has seen Sober becoming a massive spreader on the Internet. It is reportedly now taking 2/3 of all the traffic related to viruses on the net. And the latest variant codenamed, which has been tagged as Sobor.P (Sober.N, Sober.O, or Sober.S at other security companies), uses the lure for the upcoming World Cup Soccer Tournament next year.

It was first detected on Monday and is a major threat as per the security agency Sophos. Another firm Kaspersky Lab has said that the spread rate of this virus has reached ‘epidemic’ levels in the European country where the game of soccer is quite popular. Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst at Sophos said in a statement: “”This is a pretty significant virus. We usually don’t see it spread to 77 percent of all inbound viruses. Usually, it spreads much slower, and users have time to update their computers.”

The latest email comes with an invitation to click on an attachment to receive their free tickets for the upcoming soccer tournament. It suggests that the user has won the free ticket and the attachment is his way to attain them. The attachment if opened catches other mail ids stored on the system and forwards itself to them with similar messages.

A statement released by the Sophos’s threat-monitoring stations said: “Many people will be eager to attend one of the biggest sporting events in the world next year, and may think it’s worth the risk of opening the e-mail attachment just in case the prize is for real.” They also claimed that this particular variant of the virus that was first noticed in 2003 has broken records for the speed by which it is spreading around the world.

And going by the rate of its success it just might beat Netsky to become the number one virus of this year.