W32/Bagle.ad@MM Virus

[desdemona]

McAfee AVERT Reports New Bagle Virus In-the-Wild

BEAVERTON, Oregon, July 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- McAfee, Inc.

(NYSE: MFE) the leading provider of intrusion prevention solutions, today

announced that McAfee® AVERT™ (Anti-virus and Vulnerability Emergency

Response Team), the world-class research division of McAfee®, raised the

risk assessment to medium on the recently discovered W32/Bagle.ad@MM, also

known as Bagle.ad. This new variant is a mass-mailing worm that is packed

using UPX and comes in the form of a password-protected .ZIP file, with the

password included in the message body as plain text or within an image. To

date, McAfee AVERT has received numerous reports of the virus being stopped or

infecting users from the field -- with most of the reports arriving from

Japan, Australia, Germany and the UK. The samples received by McAfee AVERT

have been from users versus the virus, which is similar to other Bagle

reports.

Symptoms

The Bagle.ad worm is a mass mailing threat that harvests addresses from

local files and then uses the harvested addresses in the 'From' field to send

itself. Once activated, the worm copies itself to folders in the System

Directory that have the phrase "shar" in the name, such as common peer-to-peer

applications, and adds a registry key to the system start-up. The worm then

proceeds into the remote access component of the virus, which listens to TCP

port 1234 for remote connections. Users should be very weary and should most

likely delete any email containing the following:

From: (address is spoofed)

Subject:

* Re: Msg reply

* Re: Hello

* Re: Yahoo!

* Re: Thank you!

* Re: Thanks :)

* RE: Text message

* Re: Document

* Incoming message

* Re: Incoming Message

* RE: Incoming Msg

* RE: Message Notify

* Notification

* Changes..

* Update

* Fax Message

* Protected message

* RE: Protected message

* Forum notify

* Site changes

* Re: Hi

* Encrypted document,0

Body Text:

Various message bodies are used and in some cases contain the password for

an encrypted attachment, either in plain text or within an image.

Pathology

After being executed, Bagle.ad emails itself to addresses found on the

infected host as a password protected .ZIP file with the password included in

the message body. The virus listens on TCP port for remote connections. It

attempts to notify the author that the infected system is ready to accept

commands, by contacting various Web sites and calling a PHP script on the

remote sites. After January 25, 2005, this component of the worm will be

deactivated. The worm also carries its source code (assembler) in its body,

encrypted. When mass-mailing itself, the worm may also include a copy of the

source code within a ZIP archive-making it likely that there could be

additional trivial variants based on this source.

Cure

Immediate information and cure for this worm can be found online at the

McAfee AVERT site located at http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_126562.htm .

McAfee AVERT is advising its customers to update to the 4373 DATs to stay

protected from all the current Bagle threats.

http://www.prnewswire.com/