MUMBAI -- July 24, 2001 -- Symantec, world leaders in Internet security technology, have issued an alert for the worm W32.SirCam.Worm@mm. Researchers at Symantec AntiVirus Research Centre (SARC) have upgraded the threat level of this worm from 3 to 4 due to increased rate of submission.
"We are seeing a high number of organisations in being affected by this worm across the globe but particularly in India and the worm is still spreading," said Joy Ghosh, Country Manager, India. "We would recommend to everyone to update your definitions from www.sarc.com urgently to prevent being effected."
W32.SirCam.Worm@mm is network aware and has email spreading capabilities. The worm can arrive as an email, message or from another machine on the network. The subject of the email will be random and will be the same as the file name of the attachment in the email making it ineffective to filter for subject lines and attachments.
The attachment will be a file taken randomly from the infected computer and will have the extension .bat, .com, .Ink or .pif added to it.
The message body will be semi-random, but will always contain one of the following lines (either English or Spanish) as the first and last sentences of the message
The English version will feature:
First Line: Hi! How are you?
Last Line: See you later. Thanks
The Spanish version will feature:
First line: Hola como estas?
Last line: Nos vemos pronto, gracias
The payload is activated on the 16th of October of any given year and will delete all files on the computer.
Symantec customers can repair the damage caused through the detection within Norton AntiVirus. Definitions for the same are currently available via LiveUpdate or from the Symantec website at www.sarc.com and latest information on the worm is available at: http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sircam.worm@mm.html.
About SARC:
SARC is one of the industry's largest dedicated teams of virus experts. With offices located in the United States, Japan, Australia and the Netherlands, the sun never sets on SARC. The centre's mission is to provide swift, global responses to computer virus threats, proactively research and develop technologies that eliminate such threats and educate the public on safe computing practices.
As new computer viruses appear, SARC develops identification and detection for these viruses and provides either a repair or delete operation, thus keeping users protected against the latest virus threats.
About Symantec:
Symantec, a world leader in Internet security technology, provides a broad range of content and network security solutions to individuals and enterprises. The company is a leading provider of virus protection, firewall and virtual private network, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, Internet content and e-mail filtering, remote management technologies and security services to enterprises around the world. Symantec's Norton brand of consumer security products leads the market in worldwide retail sales and industry awards. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has worldwide operations in 37 countries. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.symantec.com.
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