Security vendor TrendMicro has declared a Medium risk alert for Worm_Sober.S, a new sober variant that is currently spreading in Germany and the United States.
This worm spreads by mass-mailing copies of itself using its own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) engine. It gathers its target recipients from files with certain extensions names. Notably, it avoids sending messages to addresses that contain specific strings.
Using social engineering techniques, it sends out an email supposedly sent by the soccer organization FIFA, informing recipients that they have won tickets for the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany.
Social engineering, a propagation technique that is widely utilized by most worm programs, invests largely on computer users' instinctive tendency to open email messages, execute attachments that are enticing and apparently harmless, and download and unknowingly open attractively named files.
More information can be found at Trend Micro page.
5/2: Sober-S Worm a 'Medium Threat'
