Sneaky Worm Wriggles Into Yahoo
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Written By Reprise Media | June 13, 2006 | Share This
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If you’ve got a Yahoo! Mail account, you might want to think twice about opening any messages about “New Graphic Site” from your old pal av3@yahoo.com; that address has been pegged as the one sending out ‘Yamanner,’ a worm that exploits a Yahoo! Mail Javascript flaw and launches automatically as soon as it’s opened.
Yamanner differs from many other worms in that it’s not buried in an attachment and requires little action on the part of users to unleash. The worm sends itself to all contacts in an unlucky user’s address book, and also forwards the addies to remote servers, probably for use in spam campaigns (according to Reuters).
For its part, Yahoo! has already countered the worm by distributing updates to its 200 million Mail users. The ‘net company says that only a “very small fraction” of its customers were effected. Security firm Symantec says that the new Beta version of Yahoo! Mail is impervious to the virus, but Yahoo! apparently wasn’t using Yamanner as an opportunity to get its flock to upgrade.
Topics: Yahoo! |