Braid Virus Worms its way thru E-Mail

[HashDump]

A new mass-mailing computer virus known as W32.Braid has slowly spread among PCs over the weekend, said U.K. e-mail service provider MessageLabs.

Although the company has seen only 43 copies of the virus--indicating an extremely slow start--W32.Braid shares some attributes of the widely spread Klez family of viruses and could potentially have similar success. One such feature: Both viruses forge a fake sender address in the e-mails they use to propagate themselves, which makes finding infected PCs more difficult.

The Klez.h variant of the Klez virus has sent out millions of e-mail messages with a copy of itself attached. Since it was first placed on the Internet in April, the virus has topped the charts of malicious e-mail attachments found by antivirus firms and e-mail service providers, which filter junk e-mail for companies and also zap messages that have viruses attached.

C|Net