A new variant of the Bagle internet worm, dubbed Bagle.B, was on Tuesday spreading quickly by e-mail throughout the world, internet security experts said.
”It was initially spread through spamming, which gave it a good start, and now it’s picking up speed and spreading quite rapidly,” said Mikael Albrecht, with the Finnish Security firm F-Secure.
No details of the new bug are immediately available, as virus crackers are still analysing it, but it is believed to have been made by the same person or group that made the earlier Bagle worm, he said.
The first variant of the Bagle worm was found on January 18, and is believed to be linked to spammers — senders of unsolicited mass e-mail advertisements — as it retrieved e-mail addresses from the computers it infected. — Sapa-AFP