What is Beagle?

One of our clients is receiving emails with the beagl worm and [email protected] as the from: address. She has received 70 in the last three weeks and numerous before that. She knows that our address is spoofed but thinks that someone hates us and is using our address intentionally. Is this possible? I thought the from address was picked randomly or each email addres in the system was used as the from for the next address in the system. We have McAfee in conjunction with AOL for constant virus protection and our computer does not have the beagl worm.

This question was answered on June 8, 2004. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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Most anti-virus vendors are calling it Bagle, while Symantec calls it Beagle; in either case, this extremely simple virus is infecting thousands of PCs Technically known as W32/Bagle@MM, the simple yet effective virus was first discovered on Sunday 18 January Beagle disguises itself as a short test message containing an .EXE attachment Unfortunately, if you run the attachment Beagle installs a backdoor onto your computer and invites its author to take control Then it sends itself to all your friends and contacts You'd think, by now, most users wouldn't touch .EXE attachments with a ten-foot cursor However, according to anti-virus vendors, Beagle has already spread to 80,000 computers What you need to do is as always remind your users never to open unexpected attachments from any source Inform them that most modern viruses falsify the "From" field and appear to come from friends and/or co-workers.

Most major anti-virus vendors already have signatures that detect B(e)agle Check with your vendor for the latest update

About the author

Posted by michael of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on June 8, 2004

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