Bavarian police have spooky Sober moment

Bavarian police issued a press release that warned of new Sober.worm virus variants, just one day before three new variants appeared.

In a bizarre set of circumstances, Bavarian Police have issued a press release (translated version) that not only warns of new Sober.worm virus variants, but also includes the email text that will appear in infected emails. The text, "Thanks for your registration. Your data are saved in the zipped Word.doc file!" appears in an email, along with an archived attachment registration.zip. F-Secure made note of this on their blog, and indicated that at least one of the new new Sober worm variants that appeared today had this identical message text.

The Bavarian Police have not provided any additional details as to how they were able to predict the new worm outbreaks, other than indicating that this was part of an ongoing investigation. The author of the Sober worm and some of its many variants is believed to be German.

Copyright © 2005, SecurityFocus