There's a new mass mailing virus in town, and it's built to make life even more difficult for anti-virus researchers.

Atak uses a variety of tactics in its attempts to escape antivirus analysis. Its main trick is to check to see if it's being run in a debugging environment. If so, it exits to avoid detection. The ploy prevents casual perusal of the code by researchers and (potentially) rival virus writers.

"I haven't seen such ruses used in a mass mailer in a long time. This piece of code is so sloppy, it's devious," said Mircea Ciubotariu, a researcher at Romanian AV firm BitDefender.

Aside from its stealth behaviour the virus is a fairly standard mass mailer. It infects Windows PCs only (natch). Atak is spreading, albeit modestly, and most AV firms rate it as a low-to-medium risk threat. ®

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