Bagle variations reaching epidemic proportions
The epidemic of email threats that download the Bagle virus continues apace, according to antivirus experts.
Maksym Schipka, senior antivirus researcher at MessageLabs, said ‘The quantities are huge to be honest …[this is] one of the largest Bagle downloaders we have ever seen. And we’ve seen three variants in the first three hours. These are repeated versions of the same malware, the only difference is the executable packers.’
This is a well-known technique, according to Shipka. ‘It’s tricky and resource consuming to add support for every packer,’ he said. And there are hundreds of these compression packers. So some antivirus companies decide instead to issue a separate signature file each time a virus is packed, or compressed, differently - even though it is the same virus. Antivirus companies now say that there are eight variants of the Bagle downloader for the current strain alone.