Sober worm about to cause major hangover

A newly discovered multilingual Windows worm has begun doing the rounds this morning, with antivirus firms reporting infections in France, Germany and Australia.

Sober I is a mass-mailer that arrives as a 56,808 byte .pif or .scr file attachment with email headers in both English and German.

Once activated the worm copies itself twice to the hard drive under a random name and begins harvesting email addresses before mailing itself on using its own SMTP engine.

Security firm Secunia is monitoring the extent and rate of its distribution and said that the worm is of 'medium' seriousness.

Most major antivirus firms now have a virus identification signature for Sober I and users are advised to update their protection as soon as possible.

More information on Sober I is available here