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Considering the number of e-mail messages scanned with BitDefender anti-virus engines during the last 24 hours, BugBear.B is reported to have sent some 385.497 e-mail messages throughout the world. As BitDefender research specialists inform, one of every 3.8 systems receiving infected e-mails appears to be infected by this new worm, increasing the spreading rates to 28% and these are only some temporary figures.

“Saying that attacks as fierce and incisive like one produced by the BugBear.B virus yesterday are a surprise would be a blunt metaphor. Over the last year, the frequent malware outbreaks were meant to be a clear sign as to the rising danger of computer virus high spreading potential”, stated Bogdan Irina, BitDefender Marketing and Sales Manager. “Nobody could have predicted the devastating long-term effects of the Klez virus during the early hours of its existence, so we should assume it as a settled lesson and take every necessary measure in order to prevent BugBear.B from becoming such a conspicuous worldwide danger” concluded Bogdan.

BitDefender Laboratories have recently warned the IT public regarding the threat new viruses bring, as they seem to share the same databases and sometimes apply similar infection protocol methods. Potential similarities between new viral performances should by no means be considered a steady weakness but an alarming sign, as some of these malicious codes may exploit common aspects and virus history achievements in order to evolve to new unimaginably powerful patterns.

The BugBear’s B version is extremely virulent and indescribably more evolved than its first one (A), at least when it comes to the structure development. It targets almost all the possible infection ways: mailing, network sharing – file infecting, it has backdoor, Trojan and key-logger components.

The main clash with previous viruses, including Klez, lies in the type of social engineering: Klez takes e-mail addresses from victim’s hard drives, but it carries an enormous database for the compiling of bodies and subjects. BugBear.B introduces a new most remarkable trick: it searches for e-mail addresses not only on mail clients’ databases, but on every single file stored on targeted computer and gets all possible addresses. Besides, it does not use predefined body messages, but compiles new ones with the data found, thus rising the credibility of e-mails sent to unprecedented levels: people receive messages from their friends and, what’s most important, in their own language and apparently with probable content. This type of social engineering is the first of a kind and what’s most significant; it proved to work perfectly as BugBear.B virus spreading reaches alarming figures. BugBear.B presents the aforementioned similarities with previous viral codes: exploits the IFRAME vulnerability; extracts text parts from other files in the infected computer same as Magistr.B virus; it processes Inbox messages the same way LovGate mechanisms did.

Moreover, it seems that this second version of BugBear virus has a keen eye for corporate environment, especially financial institutions; thousands of computers are considered to get infected by BugBear.B and that is just hourly report estimation.

BitDefender has released since yesterday (June 5, 2003, 16.00 GMT) a free removal tool, available in four international languages (English, Spanish French and German) on the BitDefender websites.

BitDefender Antivirus professional solutions are available for sale in the BitDefender store and start from USD 29.95.
Please visit this section for more technical information about BugBear.B or for other antivirus free tools.