Virus warning: Code Red variant emerges

The prolific Code Red is back with a new identity.

Anti-virus companies have discovered a variant of the malicious code in the wild that is dubbed Nimda.A. At the time of writing the number of copies detected is already in the hundreds.

According to a warning from antivirus company Messagelabs, the virus originated in Korea and first appeared on Sunday.

The virus is a mass emailer and is hidden in a readme.exe file. Once in, the virus will infect unprotected webservers on the network with a version of the Code Red program, which targeted the Whitehouse in August.

There are currently no patches to filter this virus, Messagelabs warns.

In a statement, Messagelabs chief technical officer Mark Sunner said: "The Nimda virus demonstrates how a dangerous virus can use the speed of email to spread on a large scale. Once again this outbreak shows that existing antivirus systems cannot respond quickly to new outbreaks and that the problem must be addressed at the internet level."