3 February virus: Are we ready for it?

Antivirus companies are at odds over the severity of a time-bomb virus which is set to go off on 3 February. The so-called Nyxem virus has so far infected 300,000 computers around the world, most of which are outside the UK.

We're less concerned about it being a digital doomsday. Businesses are certainly protected from this. But I have no doubt some home users will be affected.

-- Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos

Mikko Hypponen, head of antivirus research for F-Secure, said: "It's going to be a pretty big problem in Turkey, Peru and Italy but not much of a problem in the UK. There are hundreds of thousands of computers that have been affected.

"There've been 15,000 infected in the US – out of the whole computer base that's not so bad. The computers that are going to be hit will be hit badly and will lose lots of important files."

The virus, which is also nicknamed Nyxem, BlackMal and Mywife, is expected to destroy a number of work and security files on infected computers on the third day of every month.

Antivirus firm Sophos said it had seen the worm spread reasonably widely; at the time of writing it accounted for 10 per cent of virus reports.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for antivirus firm Sophos, said: "We're less concerned about it being a digital doomsday. Businesses are certainly protected from this. But I have no doubt some home users will be affected."

The worm travels as a Windows dot-exe attachment and copies itself to shared network resources on the victim's machine.

But Eugene Kaspersky, head of research and development at Kaspersky Labs, said the virus could cause havoc.

He said: "Significant numbers of computers are infected with Nyxem.E. February 3 could turn out to be a very difficult day with unprotected users losing data and the internet community at large suffering from heavy traffic."