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Mimail Worm Appears to Come from User's Own Administrator

Anti-virus vendors released a flurry of warnings over the weekend about a new e-mail worm called Mimail that is spreading in the wild. Symantec rated the virus as a 3 on its threat scale, a medium ranking that puts Mimail below only Bugbear on its current list of top virus threats.

Several vendors have published removal tools. Symantec's is available here.

Mimail arrives as an e-mail with "your account" in the subject line and an attachment called message.zip. The message appears to come from the e-mail address "admin" within the user's own domain.

When run, the attachment copies an executable to the hard drive, enters itself into the registry to run at startup and collects e-mail addresses from files all over the computer. It uses its own SMTP server to spread by e-mail, and it captures text from specific windows and sends them to e-mail addresses contained within the worm.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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