Virus warning: Sober on a Friday

Antivirus companies are today all warning of the latest email threat - a variant of the Sober worm.

Labelled as either variant 'I' or 'J' the worm has been spreading rapidly since first thing this morning. MessageLabs intercepted its first copy of the worm at 06:01(GMT).

The worm appears in an email which so far has been seen in English and German language versions, according to Trend Micro.

The English subject lines include 'Oh God' and 'Delivery_failure_notice' but the German version is entirely more provocative, according to Sophos. The emails purport to come from a 21-year-old blonde Go-Go dancer who claims to have attached naked photographs of herself.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said: "Although much-publicised virus outbreaks in the past should have made users more nervous of double-clicking on unsolicited email attachments, some still find it hard to resist."

Bogdan Dumitru, CTO at BitDefender, said: "The remarkable thing about this new virus is the amazing speed at which it is spreading. This may prove, once more, that computer users have not learned anything, or too little, from past virus outbreak experiences."

According to Trend Micro some versions of the email body copy include claims that the message has been scanned and found safe by various antivirus companies.

David Kopp, head of TrendLabs EMEA at Trend Micro, urged companies to deploy stringent rule blocking and security policies for attachments with extensions such as exe, pif and scr.