New Bagle worm uses old tricks to spread.

Sophos are warning users of beware of the latest Bagle worm, Bagle-AF, which is spreading steadily by email. Although the worm uses a multitude of randomly generated subject lines, message texts and attachments to confuse recipients, it relies on the age old trick of duping users into double-clicking on the attachment in order to spread, the worm attempts to disable anti-virus and other security products and opens up a backdoor in the PC, enabling hackers to send out spam from the compromised machine.

"Bagle-AF is hard to spot with the naked eye, but is very easy to stop--either with up-to-date anti-virus software or by simply not clicking on unsolicited email attachments Much like previous Bagle worms, this latest version also causes the infected computer to automatically send messages to a number of German websites, suggesting the worm originated in Germany. Since May 2004, when German authorities arrested Sven Jaschan, the self-confessed author of the Sasser and Netsky worms, there has been very little virus activity in this country. More information of Bagle-AF can be found at

http://www.sophos.com