Email worms aren't always as harmful as generally thought.The Sober Y Internet worm forced a 20-year-old German man to surrender before police for owning child pornography.
The man had received a copy of a mass email worm which warned that he was being investigated. The messages had a subject line in German that stated, "Preliminary investigation commenced".
And it went on to say that, "The downloading of movies, software and mp3s is illegal and therefore punishable. We can hereby inform you that your computer and IP address have been confiscated. The contents of your computer have been seized as evidence and a preliminary investigation will be launched. In the coming days, you will receive a written statement informing you of the charges and your options to file a statement." The email was signed by the German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations and landed in the mail box with an attachment containing the Sober Y virus. The message prompted the man to confess before the police that he owned pornographic pictures of children. He turned himself up at a police station in the city of Paderborn in Germany on Thursday, a local police press release claimed. According to the release, an investigation showed that the man had sent images by email and stored images on his hard drive. Sober Y worm spreads itself using several email messages. Security firm F-Secure recently had issued a Radar Level 1 alert, which is the highest, on a new variant of the Sober internet worm being sent as an email attachment. F-Secure had said that the worm seemed to be very successful in spreading partly because the messages contained bogus warnings from the FBI, the CIA or the German Bundeskriminalamt.
