Viruses stake early claim on 2002

Anti virus experts have warned UK businesses of new destructive malware attacking businesses in the new year.

Central Command, a US based virus response laboratory, has warned companies worldwide of a deadly Italian worm called I-Worm.Sheer.A. It spreads via email attachment with the subject line "Fw: Scherzo!" and has a long body text in Italian.

The worm exploits a well-known MS security hole which allows the attachment to be executed when viewing the message with Microsoft Outlook Express or Outlook. This method is similar to the one used by both the Nimda and Kak worms.

Security vendor Sophos has warned of W32/Shoho-Fam worm which also exploits a well-known vulnerability in Windows. It spreads by email attachment with the subject line "Welcome to Yahoo! Mail". Once the worm is run, it will create copies of itself in the Winl0g0n.exe directories.

Shoho-Fam will also create the file email.txt containing a copy of the email message used by the worm. The worm then searches the hard disk for any email addresses to send itself forward.

Sophos said it has seen several copies of the worm in the wild and urged companies to update their anti-virus software.

Sophos also warned of Maldal-D worm, which spreads as a .exe attachment with many different email message variants. Maldal-D will try to disable any anti-virus software running on the infected machine. Sophos said Maldal is not spreading as fast as Shoho-Fam, but the company advised IT departments to stay vigilant.