Latest WinWorm Spreads Via ICQ And Outlook

mgooderum was among the many to write in about yet another snippet of malice making the Windows desktop rounds: "The latest email virus -- 'Goner' -- is apparently running around this morning (AP news story on Iwon here - no login needed). The virus is a typical worm that spreads via attachments and user's address books. It appears as a message with an attachment that starts: 'How are you ? When I saw this screen saver I immediately thought about you...' Goner is apparently non-destructive other than the normal DoS issues with the load from it forwarding itself everywhere. What's moderately unique are two features. One is its ability to replicate via ICQ as well as the usual Outlook and Outlook Express. Two is its small size -- it has a packed form that is only 159 bytes. Symantec has details here; McAfee has details here." Update: 12/04 21:57 GMT by T : That should read 159 kilobytes. And as many posters have pointed out, "destructive" is in the eye of the beholder.

Comments

Re:In defense of Microsoft......

[Azog]

Mmmm, one important point you missed:

What also pisses me off is the people that say "oh I run Linux so I'm fine"... well buddy, I could send you

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /*

Gee, I just tried that, and all it did was print a million "Permission denied" messages. Oh, and it messed up my test account, but I fixed that with "su, deluser test, rm -rf /home/test, adduser test", and everything's back to normal.

Anyone else out there got some email viruses they want me to try out on my Linux box? They probably won't work either.

Warning to Linux non-experts: if you want to try this yourself, note that running rm -rf /* will delete any file owned by the person who runs the command.

Before you run anything off the network, you should switch your user (using the su command) to a "test" user that doesn't own any important files. You can set up a test user account by doing an "su root", "adduser test", and then "passwd test" to set the test user's password.

Carry on mocking Windows at your leisure... Or maybe the Microsoft apologists could write a little explanation of how to set up a safe testing account on Windows? Oh, that's right you can't, too bad about that.

(snicker)