Yet Another Bagle Variant Spreading Quickly

By Larry Seltzer
March 26, 2004

Yet another variant of the Bagle worm has hit the Internet. Anti-virus companies say it is spreading quickly and have given it an elevated alert status.

Bagle.U (Beagle.U in Symantec's dictionary) is a very simple worm. The e-mail message in which it arrives has no subject line or body. The attachment has a randomized file name with an .EXE extension. The user must launch the executable.


Many e-mail clients, including all recent versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook and Outlook Express strip all .EXE attachments, so those users will be protected against Bagle.U.

The Norman analysis of the worm states that when a user does receive and launch the executable, it places a copy of itself, named GIGABIT.EXE, in the %SysDir% directory (%SysDir% is a system variable usually equivalent to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM or something similar). It also sets a registry key to launch that program when the system starts.

According to McAfee's description of the worm, it also creates the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows2004 key and places two values, "fr1n" and "gsed," within it.

More: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1554896,00.asp