Panda Software warns users about the wave of new variants of the Mimail worm

HostReview.com
Monday, November 3, 2003; 12:00 AM

11/03/2003. PandaLabs has detected three new variants, E, F and G, of the Mimail worm which, according to data collected by Panda Software's international tech support network, have already started causing incidents.

The new variants of Mimail are very similar to their predecessors and are designed to mass mail themselves using their own SMTP engine. They also try to carry out denial of service (DoS) attacks on several websites. When these worms are run on a computer, they go memory resident.

All of these variants reach computers in e-mail messages that use so-called social engineering techniques to trick users into running the attached file, which actually contains the worm. The characteristics of the messages carrying the different variants of Mimail are available in Panda Software's Virus Encyclopedia.

With the appearance of these three new variants of Mimail, in addition to variants C and D that Panda Software warned users about just a few days ago, it seems that the author or authors of these viruses want to spread as many worms as possible in order to increase the probability of a computer being hit by a variant of Mimail.

Due to the high possibility of being infected by one of these variants, Panda Software advises users to treat all e-mails received with caution, and to update their antivirus solutions if they haven't already done so.

The company has already made the updates to its products available to users to ensure their solutions can detect and eliminate the C, D, E, F and G variants of Mimail. Similarly, users can also detect and disinfect this and other malicious code using the free, online antivirus, Panda ActiveScan, which is available on the company's website at http://www.pandasoftware.com

Detailed technical information on Mimail.C, Mimail.D, Mimail.E, Mimail.F and Mimail.G is available from Panda Software's Virus Encyclopedia.

About PandaLabs

On receiving a possibly infected file, Panda Software's technical staff get straight down to work. The file is analyzed and depending on the type, the action taken may include: disassembly, macro scanning, code analysis etc. If the file does in fact contain a new virus, the disinfection and detection routines are prepared and quickly distributed to users.

For more information: Yolanda Ruiz yruiz@pandasoftware.com +34 91 806 37 00