Panda Software warns of the danger of the Bagle.A worm -
Virus Alerts, by Panda Software (
http://www.pandasoftware.com)
Madrid, January 19, 2004 - According to data collected by Panda Software's
international technical support network, the new Bagle.A (W32/Bagle.A.worm)
worm is causing an increasing number of incidents in users' computers around
the globe.
For this reason, Panda Software offers all users its free PQREMOVE
application, designed to effectively clean any computer affected by Bagle.A.
This tool can be downloaded from the following address:
http://www.pandasoftware.com/download/utilities/.
Bagle.A is a worm that is designed to spread rapidly via e-mail. The e-mail
carrying this malicious code has the subject: Hi, and the message body
contains the following text:
Test =),
(a series of random characters).
--
Test, yep.
The name of the file attached to the message, which actually contains the
worm's code, consists of a series of random characters, but always has an
.EXE extension. This file is 15,872 bytes in size.
The aim of Bagle.A is to spread rapidly by creating copies of itself, which
could cause computer networks to collapse. However, this worm does not have
any other destructive effects.
Once it has been installed on a computer, Bagle.A looks for e-mail addresses
to send itself out to. It looks for these addresses in the files with WAB,
HTM, HTML and TXT extensions stored on the affected computer. Once it has
done this, the worm sends itself out to the addresses it has found using its
own SMTP engine.
Due to the possibility of being infected by Bagle.A, Panda Software advises
users to treat all e-mails received with caution, and to update their
antivirus solutions immediately. The company has already made the updates to
its products available to its clients to ensure their solutions can detect
and eliminate Bagle.A. Those whose software is not configured to update
automatically, should update their solutions from
http://www.pandasoftware.com/.
Users can also detect this and other malicious code using the free, online
antivirus, Panda ActiveScan, which is available on the company's website at
http://www.pandasoftware.com/.
For more information about Bagle.A, visit Panda Software's Virus
Encyclopedia at the following address:
http://www.pandasoftware.com/virus_info/encyclopedia
