“Welcome to the summer of the worm,” writes Dennis Fisher for eWeek. “Hard on the heels of the Blaster worm outbreak, yet another version of the resilient and ever-popular SoBig virus began spreading rapidly on the Internet Tuesday morning. Known as SoBig.F, the new variant behaves much like its older siblings, infecting Windows machines via e-mail and sending out dozens of copies of itself.”
Fisher reports, “The variant began spreading early Tuesday Eastern time, and by 9 a.m. Tuesday, MessageLabs Inc. had stopped more than 10,000 copies. The virus size is approximately 73 KB, and the attachment that actually contains the malicious code can carry any one of a number of names, according to iDefense Inc., a security company based in Reston, Va… SoBig.F installs a copy of itself in the Windows registry, in a file named ‘winppr32.exe.'”
Full article here.