Experts at Sophos have recently warned users about a new variant of the Bagle worm that is spreading online through messages offering free tickets to the Winter Olympics in Italy.
The W32/Bagle-CM worm is often attached to emails with subject lines such as: “FREE OLYMPIC TICKETS LOTTERY!”, “2006 Winter Games in Turin”, “2006 Turin Winter Games FREE Tickets”. The attachments containing the Bagle worm in these emails are typically named “Generated_bill.exe, Order_details.exe, or Service_receipt.exe”.
The content of these emails impersonates a notification from a company selling tickets for the Winter Olympics – including tickets for the closing ceremony – in Turin. However, if users open the attached file, the Bagle worm will execute a task to steal information from the user’s computer and allow malicious hackers to gain remote control of the system.
Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, stated: “The latest variant of the Bagle worm has exploited the Winter Olympics event to spread online, targeting to infect the systems of careless individuals. Companies using automated antivirus software and implementing strong security policies at their email gateways will be able to completely block the Bagle worm as well as many other types of computer worms.”
