Posted by : bpburnwal on Nov 08, 2003 - 12:17 PM General

TREND Micro is cautioning Internet users to avoid Worm_Mimail.F, a UPX compressed mass-mailing e-mail worm and denial of service (DoS) threat which pretends to be a meeting reminder from a colleague.
The original Mimail.A variant began spreading from August 1 and has now infected a rising number of computers worldwide, with its most current incarnation, mainly in Europe and the United States.

Jamz Yaneza, senior consultant for TrendLabs, said unlike other mass- mailing worms, Mimail scans an infected machine's hard drive for e-mail addresses and uses those to send out more copies of itself, skipping about 18 different file extensions of which are mostly image and music file formats.

Yaneza said it may be fairly routine to keep the worm out of a network by blocking it at the gateway, but there will be problems if a copy or two ever break through.

Complete technical details of Worm_Mimail.A to Mimail.F are available at Trend Micro's online virus encyclopaedia at http:// www. trendmicro.com/vinfo/. Users are advised to delete suspicious e- mail with characteristics of this worm immediately without opening its attachment.