Platinax Internet >> Platinax Internet News

Platinax Internet News Internet and business news for the UK online, by Brian Turner

« Nextel and Yahoo! join for mobile | Main | Gartner warns against Google Desktop »

December 14, 2004

Have a Zafi Christmas

A new variant of the Zafi worm appeared today, masquerading as a Christmas greeting. W32/Zafi.D is usually attached as a .php file, which most e-mail checkers will filter out. Also, it remains a variant that major anti-virus should be easily capable of dealing with. The main danger lays in home owners who have not kept up to date with their virus updates. Not believed to pose a widespread threat, no virus has apparently yet succeeded in using a seasonal message to rapidly spread it. So, Ho! Ho! Ho! to Zafi. :)

Zafi itself holds an interesting background, as covered by Cnet: Zafi worm purports to be Christmas greeting

The first variant of the Zafi worm was discovered in April, and the worm has evolved a great deal since then. Zafi.A tried only to send itself to e-mail addresses inside Hungary. It did not contain a destructive payload. Two months later, Zafi.B was released, and this variant was able to terminate antivirus and firewall applications and "speak" in numerous languages, including English, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

A previous variant of the virus, Zafi.C, discovered in late October, was programmed to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks on Google, Microsoft and the Web site of the Hungarian Prime Minister. Once active, the Zafi.C version scanned an infected computer's Windows Address Book and hard drive for e-mail addresses. The worm attempted to spread by composing e-mails using a complex set of rules and sending them out with its built-in SMTP engine.

Posted by brian_turner at December 14, 2004 09:26 PM

| Discuss this in the Business, Marketing & Search forums

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.platinax.co.uk/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/165

Comments

February 2005

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28

News Archives:

• Apple
• Browsers
• Business
• E-commerce
• Finance
• General
• Google
• Google Adwords & AdSense
• Google Desktop search
• Google educational
• Google legal
• Google metrics
• Google miscellaneous
• Google Sandbox
• Google security issues
• Google web search
• Google: company & staff
• Google: financial
• Internet
• Internet TV
• Marketing
• Microsoft
• Mobile devices
• Search Engines
• Security
• phishing
• Technology
• Web Development
• Webhosting
• Webmaster
• Yahoo!