In researching the previous news post, I discovered some more information about the current virus, which I had previously found referred to as Gabba-A. It is apparently also known as Oscarbot or Opanki.worm if you are a McAfee user, and Symantec has named it Backdoor.Doyorg, and Kaspersky is calling it Backdoor.Win32.Agent.jn

These are all the same virus, and as usual, the anti virus vendors have about one 100th of the information posted on their sites. They only mention one variant of the worm, and nothing about the dozens of variants that followed it that I've got in AIMFix. In addition, I would like to point out that both McAfee and Symantec added it to their virus definitions on May 02, 2005 - I had my first reported case on April 26, 2005 (and updated AIMFix within a few hours).

Honestly, I'd love to know why it is that McAfee, Symantec and the rest of the crew are so behind on this? I would really rather that I DIDN'T have to keep updating AIMFix, to be honest. There are plenty of things that rank higher on my list. I'm debating sending out virus reports to the major companies with information so they can update their definitions, but it takes a bunch more work for me to do that than to update AIMFix, so I haven't yet done so. I know they've got lots of other things to worry about but it's a bit distressing that AIMFix appears to be the only existing removal tool for hundreds of variations of virus files.

Anyway, I'll add links to the info page for the sake of completeness.

-Jay