The new devastating Magistr worm virus, which first appeared on ITWeb's radar on Friday afternoon, has exploded in distribution over the last week.
The virus's spread was reported as growing 125% in the last week by Central Command, while Symantec states on its site: "Due to the increased number of submissions, SARC has updated the threat level of this virus from three to four."
The virus has been in the wild since mid-March, but until now has had a low distribution.
Magistr spreads itself through the common method of mailing itself to people in the infected computer's Microsoft address book. The e-mail it creates contains randomly selected text and Microsoft Word files, as well as small executable and screen saver files. It attaches itself to one of the .exe or .scr files, and usually generates a random heading through the use of the files. This polymorphic behaviour makes the virus harder to detect.
When the infected file is executed on the target machine, a message stating: "YOU THINK YOU ARE GOD, BUT YOU ARE ONLY A CHUNK OF SHIT" appears.
Apart from spreading quickly, Magistr is also exceptionally dangerous, capable of overwriting hard drives, erasing the CMOS, flashing the BIOS, and sending Microsoft Word documents out over the Internet.
It overwrites every 25th file with "YOUARESHIT" as many times as it will fit into the file, and deletes every other file. If a machine has been infected for more than two months, then the desktop items move away from the mouse cursor whenever it approaches, but only on odd days.
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