Look out for Kama Sutra pics

Beware the Friday ghosts. Two e-mail worms loaded with a timer to strike every month on a precise day and programmed to overwrite all infected files this Friday, 3 February, are spreading rapidly via pornographic messages such as `Kama Sutra pics`.

The `Nyxem-D` and `Nyxem-E` worms are variants of the Worm.Win32.VB.bi virus and shrink infected files to 20 bytes, thereafter displaying an error message when you try to open them. Although this worm is not sophisticated in nature, it is spreading really fast and on a network it can start spreading from an unprotected PC and very quickly start destroying important files, according to MicroWorld, which was the first to identify it recently.

The Nyxem worm proliferates by exploiting the human psychology of getting lured by sexual content. Some of the title lines of the mails in addition to a reference to the Kama Sutra include "The Best Video clip Ever", "A Great Video", "Kama Sutra pics", and likewise. One of the oldest forms of virus proliferation, this method is nothing new, however, it`s still deadly effective as the virus has already infected more than half a million PCs around the world by Monday morning of this week.

In the wild, Nyxem is a mass mailing worm that disables security software on the computer and harvests e-mail addresses from infected PCs. It comes with an e-mailing engine and installs itself in the registry of an infected PC.

Detecting and removing the Nyxem worm:

Timely updates of MicroWorld`s anti-virus and content security products eScan and MailScan will enable you to keep threats of this nature at bay. In case of infections, you can also download MicroWorld`s free virus and spyware scanning toolkit `MWAV` from our Web site.

For more information, please visit http://mwti.net/virus_info/virusalertd.asp?vid=798.

You can also download the trial versions of the MicroWorld software from the above-mentioned Web site.