It's not often we get prior warning of worms spreading. But yesterday, German officials warned that we would see a new Sober variant using the attachment names “Word Text.zip” or “registration.zip” and, sure enough, we have Sober.V . Unfortunately, on the same day, we also have Sober.S , Sober.T , and a fairly minor variant, Sober.U. Although none are spreading extremely rapidly, both have been reported in the United States, Germany, and several other countries. An article

Trend Micro has reported that they have found a worm in the wild that abuses the recently-discovered MS05-053 vulnerability, according to their analysis here . The vulnerability, published three days ago, was rated as critical. The discovery of a worm in the field this quickly could make for one of the fastest turn-arounds from patch publishing to discovery in the wild. But, Trend Micro says, upon further review, it's unclear whether the detection is accurate. CNET News's Joris Evers reports: Trend

It's been a fairly slow week, but today we see a new Linux worm. Lupper takes advantage in a PHP vulnerability. The Register has details here , and the Internet Storm Center has technical details here .

Two new viruses worth mentioning today - one a mass-mailer spreading, one an interesting conceptual specimen. Bagle-Based “Lodear“ Appears A new worm family, Lodear, has appeared. The first variant seems to be spreading some in the wild. Information can be found here . Some antivirus companies consider this a variant of Bagle itself, and the family may be merged with the Bagle name. Lodear is similar to past Bagle variants. The primaray symptom of infection is a file called hloader_exe

Not much is in the news today, although I am happy to announce that rumours regarding the discovery of a worm using the latest Windows vulnerabilities was a false alarm. More details follow Trend Announces Fanbot.C Error From InformationWeek: A security firm on Monday mistakenly identified a new Trojan as the first to exploit one of last week's vulnerabilities in Windows, but corrected itself and labeled it as one which attacks the same bug as August's Zotob bot worm. Fanbot.c, said Trend Micro late

The Daily Update returns after a small hiatus for testing week... October 2005 Security Release Three critical updates, five important updates, and one moderate update have been released to address issues in Windows. You can view the bulletin here . And make sure to update ! Mytob Over 300 Variants Mytob.LE has been released, making it the 317th variant of the prolific Mytob family. The latest variant offers more of the same, with new passwords and emails.

A quick daily update today. Symantec has now named Sober.Q (aka .R) to be a low-medium (2) risk, although McAfee maintains it at Medium. It looks like this one is not going to be a huge outbreak. More coverage of Sober.R should be available tomorrow as we start to see reports on spread rates coming in. Symantec's write-up of Sober.R, which they call Sober.Q, can be found here . Also in news today, a small percentage of the Internet was taken down today. This was not security-related as many feared

A new worm, Sober.R, is spreading moderately in the field. More details about this when they are available, and can be found here in the meantime: http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=136390

Flaws Discovered in Kaspersky Antivirus Techworld reports that Kaspersky, a Russian security program, is having security issues with its Antivirus program due to an exploit: Kaspersky Lab has been hit by a security bug affecting a wide range of its anti-virus products. The bug isn't limited to a particular platform, and can be exploited through several common protocols to take over a protected system. The attack is apparently related to malicious .cab files. When scabbing an infected .cab file, Kaspersky

Yes, Daily Updates are back. And permanently this time! Good News, Bad News: Virus Attacks Down, but Attacks More Sophisticated As anyone who follows viruses knows, this has been a rather quiet year for viruses of all types, especially mass-mailers. This is part in thanks to better technology and enforcement, and part in thanks to luck. In any case, though, ZDNet is reporting that antivirus firm Sophos and email security company BlackSpider Technologies both have reported a significant downturn in