Mytob Variants Continue to Multiply
Monday November 21, 2005
Mytob is an extremely prolific family of backdoor access Trojans used to create a botnet of infected computers. These botnets can be used for everything from stealing credit card and financial data, sniffing passwords and CD keys related to games and other popular programs, sending spam, and pushing adware or spyware.
Mytob variants have been sent via miscreant links in Instant Messaging, disguised as game cheats, spammed via email, or engineered as a mass-mailing email worm.
On November 20th, antivirus vendor Sophos announced the discovery of Mytob.FO. The FO in Mytob.FO signifies the specific variant. When naming a virus, the first discovered is considered the A variant, the second is considered B, and so on. When the letter Z is reached, the count starts back at the beginning of the alphabet, so the 27th variant of a virus is considered the AA variant, the 28th is the AB variant, and so on. Mytob is so prolific, it has lapped the alphabet 6 times and, if the high rate of release continues, will soon be on its seventh round.
Mytob variants have been sent via miscreant links in Instant Messaging, disguised as game cheats, spammed via email, or engineered as a mass-mailing email worm.
On November 20th, antivirus vendor Sophos announced the discovery of Mytob.FO. The FO in Mytob.FO signifies the specific variant. When naming a virus, the first discovered is considered the A variant, the second is considered B, and so on. When the letter Z is reached, the count starts back at the beginning of the alphabet, so the 27th variant of a virus is considered the AA variant, the 28th is the AB variant, and so on. Mytob is so prolific, it has lapped the alphabet 6 times and, if the high rate of release continues, will soon be on its seventh round.
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