FYI. -- J. Kizito, Socnet Solutions, P. O. Box 8135 Kampala, Uganda. Tel: +256-71-806449 +31-6-48368330 Home: +31-50-5774753 Website: www.socnetsolutions.com
"Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness" The Architect -- Matrix Reloaded ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: [ICS] Virus threat Date: Thursday 16 December 2004 15:41 From: "Arthur Kwesiga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Virus poses as Christmas e-mail. Security firms are warning about a Windows virus disguising itself as an electronic Christmas card The Zafi.D virus translates the Christmas greeting on its subject line into the language of the person receiving infected e-mail. Anti-virus firms speculate that this multilingual ability is helping the malicious program spread widely online. Anti-virus firm Sophos said that 10% of the e-mail currently on the net was infected with the Zafi virus. International threat Like many other Windows viruses, Zafi-D plunders Microsoft Outlook for e-mail addresses and then uses mail-sending software to despatch itself across the web to new victims. To be infected users must open up the attachment travelling with the message which bears the code for the malicious bug. The attachment on the e-mail poses as an electronic Christmas card but anyone opening it will simply get a crude image of two smiley faces. The virus' subject line says "Merry Christmas" and translates this into one of 15 languages depending of the final suffix of the e-mail address the infected message has been sent to. The message in the body of the e-mail reads: "Happy Holidays" and this too is translated. On infected machines the virus tries to disable anti-virus and firewall software and opens up a backdoor on the PC to hand over control to the writer of the virus. The virus is thought to have spread most widely in South America, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Hungary. The original Zafi virus appeared in April this year. _______________________________________________ ICS mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.mak.ac.ug/mailman/listinfo/ics ------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/lug %LUG is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/
