Risk: Informational
Finnish software company, F-Secure, recently stated on its blog: "ISPs: we urge you to check your user traffic patterns. Locate the users that produce an unlikely large amount of constant hits to people.freenet.de, scifi.pages.at, home.pages.at, free.pages.at and home.arcor.de. Contact these users and let them know they are likely to be infected with Sober and they should clean up their act."
Mikko Hyppönen, Director of Antivirus Research at F-Secure, said: "Most affected computers belong to home users, who have no idea they've been infected. ISPs are in the best position to distinguish infected users."
The Sober worm is an attachment-based piece of malware, with the malicious code hidden in an HTML email. It was programmed to download more malicious code on 6 January and the deadline passed without incident. As a result, the virus that had been by far the most prolific recently, has stopped spreading. However, F-Secure says there are still 'at least tens of thousands of infected machines out there'.
At the time of writing this article, websites for ISPs Telewest, BT, Wanadoo and Tiscali contained no specific advisory information about the Sober worm, although they did all contain some information about Internet security issues, if you looked hard enough!