And just when you were thinking that regular spam was not enough for ya, now we get to look forward to ‘political spam’ thanks to the Sober worm.

Sober, a bulk mailing worm that includes its own SMTP server for replication, was released into the wild in 2003. The worm follows a predictable pattern: an executable e-mail attachment, the collection of e-mail addresses from the local host, and possible damage to files on the local host. In its time Sober has had an alphabet of variants, periodically making itself nuisance or crisis in IT departments and with unwary end users. The latest version, Sober.Q, is notable for two reasons. First, the message content is written in German, and the e-mails are apparently circumventing spam filters for both ISPs and users, at least in the United States. The second reason has to do with the purpose of the worm, that being its creators have an apparent goal of infecting people with ideas, particularly repugnant ones. [Read the rest]