Russian social networking worm wipes hard drive files

Vkontakte is the most popular social-networking website in Russia with over 12 million users, and is said to be the most popular Russian website full stop in terms of visitors (yes, even beating their home grown search engines).

It’s sadly no surprise then to discover that the criminal underground have attempted to take advantage of the site – which bears an uncanny resemblance to Facebook – by spreading a worm.

The W32/VKon-A worm executes its payload at 10am on the 25th of any month, wiping all files on the user’s C: drive.  The guys in SophosLabs added specific detection for it yesterday, but Sophos products were already capable of detecting it proactively as Mal/Generic-A.

More information about this threat, including a screen capture of the cartoon it displays when it runs, can be found on the…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.