It is picking up speed says F-Secure - Its an epidemic screams Kaspersky
02-17-2004 11:02:17 AM CST -- from the net
A new variant of the Bagle Internet worm, dubbed Bagle.B, was spreading quickly by e-mail throughout the world, Internet security experts said. It was initially spread through spamming, which gave it a good start, and now it's picking up speed and spreading quite rapidly," Mikael Albrecht, with the Finnish Security firm F-Secure, told AFP. The worm seemed to have appeared first in Germany, and was on Tuesday afternoon spreading quickly in Italy, Poland and the UK as well, he said. Few details of the new bug were yet available, as it was still being analyzed, but Bagle.B seemed to be installing a so-called backdoor function on infected computers, Albrecht said. In addition it made them access four web pages on the Internet, possibly to download some software to run on the infected machines, he said.
Bagle.B, which is programmed to stop propagating on February 25, is likely to have been created by the same person or group that made the earlier Bagle worm, Albrecht said. The first variant of the Bagle bug was found on January 18, and is believed to be linked to spammers -- senders of unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements -- as it retrieved e-mail addresses from the computers it infected. These addresses could enable its author to relay spam, which generate money for their sender even if only a tiny percentage of recipients open the message or buy the products or services....continued....

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