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Newmedia agency cleared of spreading worm

Klez-E is as cunning as a Fox

Updated Subscribers to a mailing list on news about 20th Century Fox received an unwelcome release yesterday when they were sent a copy of the Klez-E worm.

The infection-bearing email appeared to come from fox-news@lists.foresight.co.uk, prompting Reg readers to conclude that some breach of security at the new media agency was responsible for the spread of the pathogen.

Although a techie at Foresight told us earlier today that the worm was sent out after vandals broke into a Linux server that was used to run the list up until February 2000, this turns out to be incorrect.

Further investigation by Foresight of its Internet logs reveals it did not send out any virus. Foresight uses email screening services from Star Internet which means any virus coming from its email server would be blocked before reaching any of the 30,000 people on the list, which is now run by 20th Century Fox - not Foresight.

Klez-E, a damaging worm which normally spreads by email, has the ability to spoof the destination it comes from, AV experts at Sophos confirm.

It seems the virus infected the Windows box of a user who had fox-news@lists.foresight.co.uk in his Outlook contact list, and it then spread itself to other addresses in that user's email address book. It did this with Foresight's email address in the 'From' field, so the worm appeared to come from Foresight's servers even though its systems remained free of infection.

Fiendishly nasty things, these viruses... ®

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