Do worry: don’t be happy
p2pnet.net News:- There’s an e-bug going round in Canada (and probably everywhere else) which among other things, has a .pif attachment telling anyone who makes the mistake of opening it, “Don’t worry be happy.”
But, Do Worry. Don’t be happy. Because Zafi.B, the latest rendition of Hungary’s Zafi.A and Erkez, among other names, will shanghai your email application.
And it has a fondness for p2p applications.
Of Zafi.A, F-Secure said here, “The worm sends emails only to addresses that end with .hu so it is not likely to spread outside Hungary. Zafi was programmed to be active only in April and will cease to work starting from the 1st of May.”
However, that was then and it’s now a major problem here in Canada, where I’m based. A source at a major Canadian ISP told me Zafi.B is clogging the pipelines but good and slowing things down in a major way.
I realized it was taking two or three hours for my emails to reach people, but not because I’ve been infected. I screen everything and I never open anything unless I know where it came from. But the woman who suddenly found she’d gone well above her email account limit of 3,000 is typical of those who DID open a Zafi-mail and were bitten.
Multiply this lady by several million and you can see how the Net would get jammed up.
A memory-resident file infector, Zafi.B drops copies of itself using random file names and either EXE or DLL, says Trend Micro here, going on that it tries to overwrite .EXE files found in some folders with a copy of itself.
“It propagates via email,” says Trend. “It sends email messages to addresses it finds in files that have specific extension names.
“It also propagates via peer-to-peer file sharing applications. It does this by dropping copies of itself to folders that contain the following strings in their names: share, upload. It opens a random link previously visited by an infected user.”
Zafi runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP.
My wife, who’s Hungarian, tells me me Erkez with an accent over the first E is the third person singular of ‘To arrive’.
Right.
JN
