New worms spreading!

[Kevin P]

There are a number of new worms spreading that take advantage of the MS05-039 Plug and Play buffer overflow vulnerability to spread. Two of the fastest spreading ones are W32.Esbot.A and W32.Zotob.E. (Links take you to Symantec writeups).

Although Zotob can only infect Windows 2000 boxes, Esbot can infect any Windows box including XP, though I'm not sure if XP SP2 is affected.

Make sure to keep your patches and anti-virus up to date!

[Lex]

I heard that organized crime is now behind many of the viruses and worms hitting computers these days. I guess money laundrying has taken on a new dimension?

Doug

[Kevin P]

Well, there is a money motivation behind a lot of them nowadays. In the past, hackers wrote worms/viruses as a cheap thrill, or to see how far they would spread. Now, spammers hire virus writers to create worms that infect computers to make them into spam relays and backdoor servers for hosting pr0n and spam and stuff like that. Also, such proxies can be used to hide illegal activity such as phishing and hacking.

So to a degree, there is an organized crime factor behind at least some of the worms. Spamming is a bigger factor.