Another look at VBMania

You may have noticed that we lowered our internet threat level to low risk. We have taken another look at Email-Worm.Win32.VBMania and its prevalence and came to the conclusion the increased threat level was not warranted.

The number of overall infections has been quite low. The number of spammed messages is relatively high, but those don’t pose danger anymore as the URLs in the emails are all down. So VBMania will not harvest any additional victims through email. Additionally, VBMania will fail to (properly) run on Windows 7 when UAC is enabled.

That leaves VBMania with two infection vectors: it creates copies of itself on network shares and USB devices. VBMania can be annoying to clean up manually, but the malware doesn’t pose much of a challenge to get rid of with a security product.

The noise around VBMania really reminds me of the Bozori worm from 2005. (Some vendors called it Zotob.) For Bozori the overall infection numbers weren’t that high either. But, just like with VBMania, some big media corporations got hit which created a lot of extra buzz.

Overall, this threat is far from sophisticated – the malicious techniques it uses are ancient. As a matter of fact, the heuristics that shipped with our KAV6 release over four years ago detected this sample proactively.

To be honest, I’m still somewhat amazed that VBMania managed to make the headlines in the same week we saw a very sophisticated zero-day attack against Adobe Reader.

Corporations that ended up infected with VBMania should seriously rethink their security over the weekend.