Stration spawned again

Another wave of worms spammed out worldwide.

The W32/Stration email worm, also known as Warezov or Opnis among others, was seeded widely yet again yesterday. The latest variants show once more the organisation and determination of the criminals behind the worm family, which has been consistently tweaked and evolved in a series of waves to minimise detection from security software and maximise infection rates.

The latest variants of the worm typically arrive in mails claiming to include an attached postcard, or with Unicode content contained in an attached file, although some are still being seen using the 'Happy New Year' message of the last major run.

Most security products should have released updates to ensure detection of the latest wave, but users are as always advised to avoid opening unsolicited attachments, especially executables. Details of the latest sites used by the worm's downloaders are available from , while some statistics on the numbers seen in the past 24 hours can be seen at .