Bagle and SpamTool hand in hand

Cyber criminals are continuing to perfect their methods: spammers and virus writers are sharing information and increasing the effectivenss of their work.

The SpamTool.Win32.Small.b we detected on February 15 harvests emails on infected machines selectively: it excludes addresses with subtext strings containing parts of av vendor names. It turns out that it had been preparing today’s Bagle outbreak.

In other words, not only is malware becoming more sophisticated, but the computer underground is planning its attacks more carefully: one of today’s Bagles was sent to addresses harvested in February by the SpamTool.

Moreover, today we have already intercepted 15 new pieces of malware produced by the authour of Bagle. The newest variants follow hard on the heels of our updates and we suspect that the authour is creating new variants every time we release updates to block previous versions.