IT Observer - New Bagle Virus Has Internet Up In Arms

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New Bagle Virus Has Internet Up In Arms
Author: Jeremy C. Wright, Staff Writer
Monday, 01 November 2004, 17:06 GMT

Friday's announcement by Panda Software that they had raised the thread level of the newest Bagle virus (BC through BE) to "Red Alert" sent tremors through the antivirus community this weekend. Many have called this an overreaction; however the threat remains very real.

Panda have since dropped the alert to an "Amber" status, which is in line with other virus companies' "Medium" threat assessments.

According to Virus Advisories by Trend and McAfee, this fast-spreading worm is targetting the unsuspecting. Being distributed by email with innocuous subject lines such as "RE: Hello" and "RE: Thank You!", the virus is being run from COM, CPL, EXE and SCR attachments by unwary email users worldwide. The attachments are typically named "PRICE" or "JOKE", however variants are bound to emerge as this strain of the virus morphs over time.

In addition, BAGEL.BC, as the overall threat is becoming known, spoofs sender addresses and opens TCP port 81 which may allow a hacker to carry out remote attacks. The general recommendation from every major antivirus vendor is to update your antivirus pattern files and engines as well as to delete any suspicious emails even if they are from people you trust, as the worm is spoofing addresses.

Much like the original Bagle virus released early this year, the new variants harvest emails from infected computers, install a custom SMTP email engine in order to send virus-infected and may be able to infect P2P communications. In spite of the hightened sense of alert over this virus, antivirus companies like Sophos are reporting very few infections.

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