Never Trust a Panda

Unless you live in a cave, and possibly even then, you will have heard of the ‘panda’ or ‘joss stick’ virus more properly known as the Fujacks worm. In the last 3 months of 2006, security specialists Sophos had detected more than 31,000 web pages with versions of the malware. Things are, reportedly, much worse in China where some reports have classified it as a top level threat infecting ‘several million’ computers. For sure the worse hit have been computers running Chinese language versions of Windows, although it will happily spread its payload on English versions as well. Oh, and that payload? Well given the common name it isn’t too difficult to guess that it turns the icons of infected applications into pandas holding joss sticks. However, this parasitic virus spreads by using existing .exe files as hosts for the infection, spreads to network shares and removable devices, creates autorun files and breaks applications thanks to being a poorly coded pile of crud. As such, the payload is often far worse than lots of pictures of pandas on your PC, instead that PC will be all but unusable until it is disinfected.