[GPSL-Tradingpost] Worm Alert

[Paul Smith]

TradingPosters:

You may have noticed an occasional German spam message from the TradingPost
list. Here is the culprit...

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"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."
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The list is locked down to subscribers only and so is not open to
re-broadcasting the spam which may be flooding your inbox. 

However, occasionally a message may get through when a subscriber's email
address is used as the "From:"

A side effect of the locking down I have done will be to discard any posts
you might make from a different address from your subscription addrss. So,
if you post and do not see your posting come back, check which address you
are using.

Also, check your virus blockers because one of you, at least, has the Worm.

Happy trading,
Paul Smith
webmaster at gpsl.org