Ganda Worm Lures in Victims and Fends off Antivirus Programs

A new and clever Internet email worm virus has been detected, called “Ganda” (I-worm.Ganda). The worm spreads via the Internet as an email attachment. “Ganda” inserts its component into executable Win32 PE EXE files and even actively protects itself against anti-virus programs.

The worm itself is a Windows PE EXE file that has a size of 45056 bytes. Its code is written in the Assembler programming language.

The Ganda worm takes its subject line and message body text from ten different variations in both Swedish and English, the language used by the worm depends on a computer’s language settings. The attachment file’s name follows a system where the name is xx.scr and “XX” is two random letters ranging from “a” to “z”. To send out infected messages “Ganda” uses the SMTP server.

“Ganda” cleverly lures in readers of its email body text messages with interesting themes often followed by a “call to action” that leads the more curious among us to click on and launch the virus code in the attached file despite its suspicious nature. Some intriguing themes covered in the messages texts are:
– a promise to display an animation the FBI is “wants to stop”
– a screensaver that, once viewed, will make it hard for anyone to say George Bush is not an alien
– several messages referring to nazi related themes
– cat lovers are targeted with a “four kittens running around” screensaver
– a screensaver showing an image captured by “one of the US spy satellites during one of it’s missions over iraq”

The “Ganda” worm defends itself against anti-virus programs. The worm terminates the active processes in code found to contain the following text strings: virus, firewall, f-secure, symantec, mcafee, pc-cillin, trend micro, kaspersky, sophos, norton.

For more detailed information covering the “Ganda” worm virus please consult the Kaspersky Virus Encyclopedia at: