Monday, February 21, 2005

Paris Hilton email viruses?

The W32/Sober-K worm or I variant (depending on the AV vendor), which is spreading in the wild, bulk mails itself using a variety of different subject lines including "Paris Hilton, pure!" and "Paris Hilton SexVideos". It can send itself in either German or English language, depending on whether it believes the recipient's email address to be owned by a German or English speaker.
The W32/Ahker-C worm sends itself using the subject line "Paris Hilton...download it!" and an attached file called "ParisXXX.zip". The worm attempts to disable anti-virus and firewall software running on the computer, and blocks access to a number of websites, potentially opening up the PC to further attack by hackers and malware. The strange thing is that the worms are discovered on the same day that it was reported that hackers have broken into Miss Hilton's mobile phone address book, and published the private telephone numbers for celebrities such as Anna Kournikova, Lindsay Lohan and Vin Diesel. Coincidence?