Via PC World: Sober Worm Spawns German Spam

E-mail users perplexed by the barrage of German-language spam waiting in their inboxes Monday morning can point the finger of blame at the latest version of the Sober mass mailing worm which began rapidly spreading over the weekend.

Sober.q uses both German and English-language messages to direct recipients to Web sites with right-wing German nationalistic content, according to an advisory from e-mail security company MX Logic. One of the URLs points to the Web site of the right-wing German NPD party, it says.

The security firm says that it had seen over 125,000 instances of Sober.q overnight Saturday and into Sunday, and labeled it as a high severity threat. The variant is downloaded by computers already infected by the Sober.p worm, which began circulating earlier this month, MX Logic says. The virus writers appear to have remote control over the Sober.p infected machines, giving them a network from which to launch future spam and denial of service attacks, it adds.

I was wondering what the deal was, as it looked like spam, but also seemed to be acting like some kind of virus. I was especially vexed since I was getting it on my university account–which was weird for spam since the account is essentially brand new, given the recent switch of our e-mail server.