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Worm Remains Low Risk Most Places
McAfee has given a rating of Medium Risk to a new mass-mailer, a variant of the Netsky family. The worm, which is similar in nature to past Netsky variants, is known as Netsky.AG. So far, McAfee is the only antivirus company to give the worm a medium risk rating. More information can be found here.
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I have received a few unsubstantiated reports of the Bagz worm, or at least a close variant of it, being in the wild. The reports have been associated with the .B variant, although no write-up has been posted. Symantec has one for the original, however. It can be found here.
The worm is quite clever in the emails it sends, obviously gathering from successful worms such as Netsky and Bagle. For now, Bagz is definitely low risk, and probably the original variant will remain so, but I would keep a very close watch on this family for future versions.
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I'm a big fan of F-Secure's excellent weblog, especially on information about viruses that is important but typically not included in write-ups as they would only be interesting to the virus researcher or watcher. Another excellent aspect of their weblog is that they post information about conferences and meetings that are very difficult to attend. Gargo, from F-Secure's virus research team, writes from beautiful Chicago, Ill., where the conference was held on September 30th and October 1st:
Katrin, Mikko, Ero and Myself have attended this year's Virus Bulletin conference in Chicago. Virus Bulletin is the largest antivirus conference which attracts some hundred delegates from antivirus companies and other organizations interested in the computer virus problem.
VB2004 had some good talks on broad range of topics. In the techie track quite a few talks circled around the topic of using virtual machines and virtualisation for different purposes. In the corporate track some other taks covered topics like the true cost of computer viruses and criminal aspects of virus writing. This year's conference was the first to include a spam-focused track as well.
The conference has now come to an end and Chicago is waiting to be explored before we head home...
I bring up this conference because it is one of the most excellent sources of in-depth technical sessions with some of the best and brightest of the business. The conference covers the business aspect of antivirus companies, but also has many discussions on future threats and improved handling of current threats. A full program is available on Virus Bulletin's web site, here.
However, with a registration price of $1,595 ($1,395 for Virus Bulletin subscribers) plus $175 more per night for the hotel, it's a bit expensive for hobbyists - or most professionals, for that matter.