W32/Mimail.P Worm

 Information about the W32/Mimail.P Worm:

W32/Mimail.P is a mass mailing worm. This worm is a variant of W32/Mimail.J worm. The worm has a capability to collect the available email addresses from the infected system and tries to mail itself to these addresses using its own SMTP engine.

It arrives with the following subject:

Subject: GREAT NEW YEAR OFFER FROM PAYPAL.COM!

The body of the infected mail will be:

*** GREAT NEW YEAR OFFER FROM PAYPAL.COM ***

Dear PayPal.com Member,

We here at PayPal.com are pleased to announce that we have a special New Year offer for you!

If you currently have an account with PayPal then you will be eligible to receive a terrific prize from PayPal.com for the New Year. For a limited time only PayPal is offering to add 10% of the total balance in your PayPal account to your account and all you have to do is register yourself within the next five business days with our application (see attachment)!

If at this time you do not have a PayPal account of your own you can also register yourself with our secure application and get this great New Year bonus! If you fill out the secure form we have provided PayPal will create an account for you (it's free) and you will receive a confirmation e-mail that your account has been created.

That's not all! If you resend this letter (with its attachment) to all of your friends you may be eligible to receive another New Year bonus because the 1000 PayPal members that send the most of these to their friends will get the bonus. If you are one of these 1000 lucky members then PayPal will add 17% of your total balance to your account!

Registration is simple. Just unpack the attachment with WinZip, run the application, and follow the instructions we have provided. If you have problems opening the application then you may want to try downloading a free version of WinZip from http://www.winzip.com

Do not miss your chance at this fantastic opportunity! Thousands of our current customers have already received their prizes and now it's your turn; so hurry up and take advantage of this special offer!

Best of luck in the New Year,

PayPal.com Team

The infected mail carries an attachment pp-app.zip

When the infected attachment is executed, the worm copies itself as winmgr32.exe under the Windows folder. It alters the windows registry at the following location to load itself during next startup;

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

The worm also changes the Internet Explorer Home page to;

http://www.anvari.org/db/fun/World_Trade_Center/Bush_Monkey.jpg

This worm first appeared on 7th January 2004.

 Other names of W32/Mimail.P Worm:

This worm is also known as W32/Mimail.p@MM, Win32.Mimail.P, WORM_MIMAIL.P, Win32.HLLM.Foo