German Spam - Sober Virus

Ah, hah!

So, this is where all those German spam messages have been coming from.

Sober, which is a popular virus that has been roaming the Internet since 2003 and controls thousands of infected machines online, took a new turn over the weekend when it started sending out millions of spam messages related to German political views to users globally.

According to security reports, the author decided to use the infected computers and requested them to download a newer version of Sober, codenamed Sober-Q, which would later send out tens of millions of spam messages over the weekend. Security experts said the worm is not critical and isn’t designed to spread. It’s merely for sending out millions of spam messages to depict a certain political view.

The e-mail messages contain links to various stories on legitimate German news websites, and according to spam analysts, there are potentially 72 variants of the spam.

I haven't had any in my Hotmail account, but my day-job work e-mail has been lousy with this stuff.

String 'em up, I say!