MicroWorld Press Releases - Take Your Guard on Friday, the 3rd ... 2 Feb 2006

The clock is ticking away. And for all that you know, you could be sitting on a time bomb. The newly found Nyxem worm bomb is expected to go off this Friday, the 3rd of February, as reported earlier by MicroWorld Technologies. The dangerous worm, first reported by MicroWorld, spreads via pornographic messages like ‘Kama Sutra Pics’.

MicroWorld experts have found that Nyxem is set to destroy a large number of files on infected computers on the 3rd of every month. It shrinks files with extensions .doc, .pdf, .psd, .ppt, .pps, .rar, .xls and .zip to 20 bytes and displays an error message when you try to open them. Though this worm is not sophisticated in nature, it’s spreading fast. On a network, this worm can start proliferating from an unprotected PC and can terminate loads of data, on the run.

Nyxem proliferates by exploiting the human psychology to get lured by sexual content. Some of the subject lines of the mails are ‘The Best Videoclip Ever, School girl fantasies gone bad, A Great Video, Kama Sutra pics, Arab sex DSC-00465.jpg’ and likewise. One of the oldest forms of virus proliferation, this method is nothing new. However, it’s still proving to be effective as the virus has already infected a great volume of PCs around the world. The Prime victims are those small business houses and home users without up-to-date virus protection. Of the countries, Turkey, Peru, Italy and India are affected the most.

“In nature, Nyxem is a mass-mailing worm that disables security software in the computer and harvests email addresses. One wouldn’t smell a rat when it comes from a colleague or a friend and that explains why it’s spreading wider. Nyxem comes with an emailing engine and installs itself in the registry. We had updated the protection in our software on January 17th itself. We strongly urge our users to update their software and perform a complete scan” said, Govind Rammurthy, CEO, MicroWorld Technologies.

Resolution
Timely updates of MicroWorld Products eScan and MailScan will enable you to keep off threats of this nature. In case of infections, you can download our free virus and spyware scanning toolkit ‘MWAV’ from our website.

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 same website.

MicroWorld Technologies (www.mwti.net) is the developer of the world's most advanced AntiVirus, Content Security and Firewall software eScan, MailScan, and eConceal. MicroWorld Winsock Layer (MWL) is the revolutionary technology that powers most of MicroWorld products enabling them to achieve several certifications and awards by some of the most prestigious testing bodies, notable among them being Virus Bulletin, Checkmark, TUCOWS, Red Hat Ready and Novell Ready.

To learn more, kindly visit http://www.mwti.net.

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