YOU HAVE A VIRUS
If you have suddenly gotten a bunch of junk email from Germany over the
weekend, here is an explanation.
Meantime, please just delete any junk German Spam you may have
received:
This ran in Der Spiegel online:
May 16, 2005 Print | Send this article | Feedback
SPIEGEL'S DAILY TAKE
Spam This!
Another round of German rascist email spam is congesting the world's
inboxes. In the run up to the important vote in North Rhine-Westphalia,
German right-wing extremists are using the tactics of Viagra spammers in
an attempt to influence the outcome of the vote. Also: Khodorkovsky is
found guilty and is Uzbekistan the next Tiananmen Square?
Hate-Spam Du Jour
AP
German right-wing extremists are behind another plague of email spam.
If your inbox was flooded over the weekend with odd German messages,
you're not alone. A new spam epidemic broke out online sometime late
Saturday, and some users have reported getting thousands of short emails
with links to a variety of extreme right- wing Web sites, as well as
regular news sites like SPIEGEL Online and the Web site of Die
Tageszeitung. While the exact source of the virus isn't known, it
appears to be aimed at voters in the German federal state of North
Rhine-Westfalia, the country's most populous state, where elections are
due next Sunday. It is apparently meant to promote the National
Democratic Party of Germany, or NPD, a party at the extreme right wing
of the political spectrum in Germany.
The messages come with subject lines like "Bloody Self-Justice," "
Multi-Kulturell = Multi-Kriminell" or "Turkey in the EU", and have a
short message saying "read for yourself" followed by the links. The
general themes are anti-immigrant, though many of the articles linked
from SPIEGEL Online and other reputable news sites, would have to be
willfully misread to be seen as promoting racist or anti-immigrant
views.
It's not clear exactly who is behind the virus -- though it seems
likely it has something to do with the German NPD -- but the method they
are using is clear. The culprit is the Sober.Q virus, the newest version
of the Sober virus, a worm that infects address books and sends a copy
of itself to all the entries. Various security firms have released
warnings that they received hundreds of thousands of Sober.Q emails
within the first 24 hours of the virus' outbreak.
Scott Chasin, an email security expert, told ZD Net Australia that the
virus basically gives its author (or authors) a "megaphone to distribute
messages of hate." Computers infected with the Sober virus might not
know it, and the virus is programmed to lay silent until an appointed
spam attack time. "Spam has been traditionally regarded as annoying
messages that promote Viagra, porn and low cost mortgages... But for the
past year we have seen a trend in which worm authors are using spam not
to hawk goods, but as a tool for political propaganda," said Chasin. The
spam's distribution takes place via computers infected with the
Sober-virus -- arguably the most successful, albeit regrettable, German
high-tech export in years. Sober carries its own SMTP-mailserver, which
the right- wing hackers use to open a backdoor in the Windows operating
system in order to distribute their propaganda spam.
The apparent senders of the spam-mails actually have nothing to do with
it: Sober steals mail-addresses from infected computers and distributes
itself in the name of any mail-address it can find. Another thing.
Sober.Q runs on computers previously infected by an earlier version of
the virus, Sober.P, which appeared only a week ago disguised as an email
proclaiming free tickets to the Soccer Cup in 2006. That virus, which
was able to switch into German or English, was particularly effective in
soccer-crazed Germany, which will be hosting the cup matches. Some
suspect that the World Cup virus was laying the ground-work for this
current attack. Sober.P went dormant about a week ago, during which time
the virus' authors may have been updating it to send out hate spam. The
themes that the spam covers -- immigration, multi-culturalism -- are
up-to-the-minute current in German politics. This new virus is also
similar to one that popped up in inboxes around the world last summer,
in which German hate groups also used the tactics of Viagra spammers to
spread racist propaganda. That virus, known as Sober.G, bombarded email
addresses with similar messages in the run up to the European Union
elections.
Accounts at email services like Yahoo and Gmail have been attacked, as
well corporate mail-accounts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland -- some
of which, facing message counts of up 10,000 per account, are at the
brink of collapse.
The bad news is that most users wouldn't even know if they were
infected. Even getting the spam doesn't necessarily mean your computer
has the virus. At the moment, there is nothing even those who do know
they are infected can do against a spam attack except start hitting the
delete button. Luckily, email providers and anti-virus software firms
are already busy updating their software to fight this nasty new threat.
(1 p.m. CET)
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,356140,00.html
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