Massive PC worm attacked Symantec Antivirus

Security experts warn Symantec Antivirus users to quickly install the necessary patches or their PC will become a prey for a new worm.

Symantec had previously countered information about the attack with the worm. However, soon after this attack was authenticated and the security firm had to acknowledge its existence.

The attack targeted PCs running Symantec Client Security and Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition older versions through a security patch patched by Symantec seven months ago.

Once infected, the worm will turn the system into a Zombie PC. In other words, the user's PC has been kidnapped by the mastermind of the attack and turned it into their effective tool in spam attack campaigns or any other purpose.

Norton Antivirus software is not the target of this attack.

" It's a new variant of the Spybot worm. It has been around since December of last year ," said Vincent Weafer, Director of the Group reacting quickly to Symantec's security issues. . " This may be the most dangerous version of Spybot ."

The new Spybot variant breaks into the PC through a patched security bug in Symantec Antivirus application. Once hacked into this worm system, it will connect the PC to an Internet Relay Chat server to allow the mastermind to attack the remote PC.

The first version of Spybot attacked Symantec Antivirus discovered in November last year. " We know for sure that Spybot exists somewhere on the Internet and is constantly attacking our customers. The attacks began to boom strongly since December 20 , 2006 ," Weafer said.

On May 25, 2006, Symantec released a security update to patch the vulnerability exploited by Spybot. However, not all Symantec users have fully installed this patch. Part of this is because Symantec does not release patches through the automatic update feature. Users must go to its website and download the patch. Symantec is considering changing this policy.

Security companies recommend users to quickly install patches as soon as possible.

Hoang Dung