Email defense solutions MX Logic (mxlogic.com) reported on Sunday that the latest variant of the prolific Sober mass-mailing worm began to penetrate email inboxes overnight Saturday, and Sunday. By noon Mountain Time on May 15, the MX Logic Threat Center reported over 125,000 instances of the Sober.Q worm categorizing it as a high severity threat.

The latest variant, W32/Sober.Q, uses German and English language messages that contain URLs to right-wing German nationalistic Web sites. One of the URLs points to the home page of the right-wing German party NPD. This spread of spam messages comes amid ongoing celebrations in Germany and throughout Europe this week for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

"Spam has been traditionally regarded as annoying messages that promote Viagra, porn and low cost mortgages," says Scott Chasin, CTO of MX Logic. "But for the past year we have seen a trend in which worm authors are using spam not to hawk goods, but as a tool for political propaganda."

In June 2004, MX Logic reported the first use of a spambot network to spread entirely political spam caused by a Sober variant. Spambots store email addresses from the Internet, including such outlets as Web sites, newsgroups, special-interest group postings, and chat-room conversations, to build mailing lists for sending spam.