Windows PCs infected with the worm will attempt to launch a denial-of-service attack against file-sharing web sites at edonkey2000.com, kazaa.com, emule-project.net, as well as alleged software pirating sites cracks.am and cracks.st.
We want to prevent hacker, cracking, sharing with illegal stuff and similar illegal content, comment text found in the worm reads, according to Trend Micro Inc’s description of the virus.
NetSky.Q, rated as medium risk by most antivirus companies, also contains comment text that says we don’t have any criminal inspirations and we do not have any backdoors included for spam relaying. and we aren’t children.
There’s no such thing as a good virus, said Joe Hartmann, Trend’s director of North American virus research. I hope the CDC [Center for Disease Control] doesn’t start trying to prevent biological viruses by spreading them.
They say they’re not criminals, Hartmann said. But try to explain this to an administrator who has to shut down his services or his email servers because of the number of infections.
Hartmann said the NetSky viruses have been remarkable only in the extent that they spread quickly. Trend has a theory that the writers are using compromised PCs as relays to seed the internet with many infections at once.
The person or persons behind NetSky call themselves the SkyNet Antivirus Team, a reference to the SkyNet supercomputer in the Terminator movies, and claim to be based in Russia. Previous iterations of the worm suggested a Czech link.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
