Home » Hacking News » Sober.q sends German spam
Sober.q sends German spam
by Nikola Strahija on May 16th, 2005 A new Sober mass mailing worm began rapidly spreading over the last weekend. Sober.q uses both German and English-language messages to direct recipients to Web sites with right-wing German nationalistic content.
The latest sober worm is one of a relatively new type of "propaganda spam," meant to spread political messages rather than sell stuff.
A security firm said that it had seen over 125,000 instances of Sober.q overnight Saturday and into Sunday, and labelled it as a high severity threat.
The variant is downloaded by computers already infected by the Sober.p worm which began circulating earlier this month. The virus writers appear to have remote control over the Sober.p infected machines, giving them a network from which to launch future spam and denial of service attacks.
E-mail users are advised to update their spam filters to guard against the new Sober spam, although it seems like the worm itself stopped spreading.
