The Kama Sutra worm, designed to begin deleting files on infected computers this morning, has caused virtually no damage, according to antivirus firms.
The worm, also known as Nyxem.E, MyWife and Blackworm, has been circulating for a couple of weeks and antivirus vendors say enterprises have done well to ensure their networks were protected against the pest.
Finnish anti-virus company F-secure, has warned of a Trojan horse that has been spammed out to email addresses disguised as a message from them.
F-Secure detects this as W32/Breplibot.ae that has been seen attached to email messages pretending to come from the Helsinki-based company. The malware can have a subject line chosen from "Firefox Browsing Problem", "Mozilla Browsing Problem", or "Website Browsing Problem". The message body read as follows:
"There are a lot of people who are going to be very unhappy on the third of February," said Professor Merrick Furst from the Georgia Tech College of Computing.
That's when the Kama Sutra computer worm will begin destroying critical files on infected computers. And hundreds of thousands of machines may have the worm lurking within their Windows operating system, ready to be unleashed on February 3 and the third of every month thereafter.
A researcher has reopened the subject of beneficial worms, arguing that the capabilities of self-spreading code could perform better penetration testing inside networks, turning vulnerable systems into distributed scanners. The worms, dubbed nematodes after the parasitic worm used to kill pests in gardens, could give security administrators the ability to scan machines inside a corporate network but beyond a local subnet, David Aitel, principal researcher of security firm Immunity, said at the Black Hat Federal conference.
Businesses should brace themselves for a further spread of the Kama Sutra worm next Friday (3 February), as the worm is programmed to try and replicate itself from already-infected machines.
The worm, also given the name Nyxem.E by security software suppliers, will at the same time attempt to delete certain files on infected machines – it has been programmed to do this on the third day of every month.
It is estimated that the worm, which is spread by users opening an attachment promising porn images, has already infected around 500,000 machines worldwide.
While cellphone viruses are in their infancy in South Africa, information technology experts predict a growing problem that could cost the country's 30 million cellphone users billions of rands in anti-virus software, local daily The Mercury said on Wednesday.
Several Trojan horses that target mobile phones have been discovered since the start of the year, but the threat level remains low.
Symantec, which sells software to protect mobile devices, has since the beginning of the month identified nine new Trojan horses that target the Symbian operating system. The pests crash phones, attempt to install other malicious software or try to wirelessly transmit personal data to other gadgets, according to Symantec.
Two decades ago, Brain, the first boot sector virus that infected personal computers via the floppy disk, was detected. While Brain itself was relatively harmless, it marked the genesis of the world of computer viruses.
This year marks the 20th year of the existence of viruses after Brain was detected on January 19, 1986.
A new, more malicious version of a worm that targets Oracle database software has surfaced. The worm source code was sent out on a popular security mailing list just before the new year, security experts have said.
The new variant of what's been dubbed the "Oracle voyager" worm has a more malicious payload than the original variant, but still lacks a replication mechanism, Pete Finnigan, an Oracle security specialist wrote in his blog.
Viruses aren’t going away any time soon. In fact, they’re going to worsen as hackers become savvier and devices proliferate. Each new device on the market provides hackers with new opportunities.
Panda Software and McAfee were among the antivirus vendors presenting new product lineups for 2006 at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.
McAfee’s product family includes VirusScan Mobile for devices such as personal digital assistants and smart phones, which combine PDA and mobile phone technology into one device.
