In mid-late May, you might have noticed your inbox being inundated with emails in German. These emails didn't actually contain a virus, but they were the direct result of the Sober worm, and marked one of the first examples we've seen of virus writers using their tools toward political ends.

As you likely already know, most virus outbreaks occur via email attachments. When you open malicious attachments, your machine can become infected. The most common of these viruses is the "worm", which then goes through your system, looking for email addresses and sending itself onto people you know.

One of the by-products of many of these worms is that they leave a 'backdoor' open on your system, allowing the virus writers to access your system remotely, without your permission. It is these backdoors that turn machines into zombies (see our March article where we describe zombie computers), and in May some right-wing (read neo-nazi) extremists began using the backdoors of these infected systems to send out spam with links to politically motivated websites.

While these emails themselves didn't contain a virus attachment – they just had harmless links to some pretty disturbing content – and most people we spoke to were just confused as to what it all meant – it serves to illustrate the ongoing risks of being infected with a virus – your machine becomes a zombie – and also the concerning step where viruses go beyond being an IT issue, and start to play a part in society broadly through political or other means.

Our tip as always is to protect yourself from viruses (see our story 'Avoiding Viruses' from this time two years ago for instructions and advice) and don’t be surprised to see virus writers taking advantage of their tools to do more harm than spread racist propaganda – it won't be long now until a virus breaks a serious law, and if it is your computer doing the damage, you're likely to be legally accountable.