p2p news / p2pnet: Today, January 5, is the date set for the infamous Sober worm to become active. Or is it tomorrow? Either way, does that mean the world will come to an end?

Sober.Y was the biggest email outbreak of the year and is still behind some 40% of all infections, said F-Secure last month.

On its launch dated, all infected systems will try to download and run a file from a website, "forever," said company research director Mikko Hyppönen.

Now, "We’ve received some questions on when exactly does the Sober activation on January 6th happen," he says. "After all, it already is past the midnight in Auckland! But the Sober date check is not using local time.

"The Sober download phase starts globally at the same time: at midnight UTC (aka GMT). All infected machines regularily connect to several NTP servers and synchronize themselves using the "time" protocol."

Hyppönen says he isn’t expecting any major disruptions, "But if anything happens, it will start happening after midnight in UK, 4pm in San Francisco, 7pm in New York, 2am in Finland and 9am in Tokyo."

Also See:
40% of all infections – Secrets of the Sober worm, December 9, 2005
not using local time – The exact activation time for Sober, January 5, 2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2006 at 8:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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