First worm of the year?

by admin January 2, 2007 at 5:24 am

“Happy New Year” – from Trojan

An email worm disguised as a New Year’s greeting is making the rounds on the internet.

Worm-laden messages are titled “Happy New Year” and contain an attachment called either postcard.exe or postcard.zip, according to experts at VeriSign’s iDefense Labs, which provides information on security flaws and exploits. If the attachment is opened, malicious software is downloaded from the internet and can infect computers running Windows operating systems.

Once a computer is infected, it looks for open mail proxies and begins spamming mail to infect other computers. The worm is already moving quickly across the net, at a rate of five emails per second on at least one large network, according to the iDefense Labs website.

Full story: silicon.com