Two organizations send viruses to mailing list subscribers…
Despite the
recent conviction
of
Welsh Wiccan
Simon Vallor, for writing and distributing
three mass-mailing viruses
, virus writers seem to have been given a helping hand recently when it comes to distributing their creations.
Those with good memories will remember
W95/Marburg
, which was included on ‘
the master CD of the popular MGM/EA PC CD-ROM game “Wargames”
‘, and subsequently on various PC magazine cover-disks. Kaspersky ‘s mailing list was ‘
hijacked
‘ a couple of months ago, resulting in subscribers to the list being sent a message containing
Braid
.
Sobering stuff, especially in today’s
rather litigious environment
.
In the last week, two organizations have managed similar stunts. Norway’s
Data Inspectorate
, a government agency that provides security information to subscribers, claims its external email server was infected by the
Funlove
virus, resulting in 1,700 subscribers receiving a copy. One would hope that people with enough nous to subscribe themselves to a security mailing list would be adequately protected.
Sadly, the same cannot be assumed for subscribers to online betting firm
bet365
‘s mailing list. Due to a technical oversight of the security kind, subscribers were sent a copy of
W32/Lirva
. According to
The Register
, ‘bet365 has an active customer base of 10,000 people. Figures for the number of people on the list, much less the numbers who received the Avril [Lirva] worm last night, are unclear.’
As an aside, a CNET
analysis
of one of Simon Vallor’s viruses, Redesi, is somewhat bafflingly presented on a web page entitled: ‘Redesi – Software Reviews’ – but then we
never liked their ‘reviews’
anyway…
Posted on 23 Jan 2003 by
Virus Bulletin
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