eSoft announces that users of its InstaGate Integrated Security Gateways and ThreatWall Content Security Gateways have been protected against the rapidly proliferating "Happy New Year" worm since it began propagating. eSoft customers received signatures designed to repel the newest worm as of December 29, the day it began spreading via emails containing seasonal greetings in the subject line.

According to a CNET.com article about the worm, these messages are sent with the subject line "Happy New Year" and contain an attachment called either postcard.exe or postcard.zip. Once the recipient opens the attachment, malicious software is downloaded from the Internet which infects Windows computers, and like many viruses, the "Happy New Year" worm is not recognized by all virus scanners. Furthermore, once the computer is infected, the worm looks for open mail proxies and begins spamming to infect other computers. On January 2, CRN estimated that the "Happy New Year" worm accounted for 12 percent of all e-mail traffic over the weekend, according to antivirus vendors.

eSoft users are automatically protected with signatures designed to repel the "Happy New Year" worm. In addition to this particular worm, eSoft has also added and distributed signatures to protect against specific Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) device exploits, which means eSoft protects Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic on vulnerable equipment.

"Historically, this type of worm gets the most traction over a holiday weekend when administrators are less vigilant about watching their networks," said Patrick Walsh, Threat Center Manager at eSoft. "eSoft has proactive threat detection technology in place to help prevent this type of threat, and also to alert the network administrator when threats do occur. There are many organizations losing time to the Happy New Year worm this week, but not our customers. Our Threat Prevention Team has become expert at staying ahead of hackers as well as responding to new trends and threats. Needless to say, we've had quite a few calls of gratitude this week."