The Hindu : National : Beware of Blackworm

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 03, 2006

National

National

Beware of Blackworm

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore: Almost all anti-virus product companies, Indian Internet providers as well as software biggies such as Microsoft have warned customers to be alert on February 3 (Friday) for a mass attack by the "Blackworm" virus — also known as "Kamasutra" because it lures users by dangling sexual content.

The virus attacks and deletes common files on one's hard drive — like Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It will also copy itself and resend to persons on one's mailing list. It first appeared in January and seems to activate on the third day of every month. Global monitoring agencies, say major anti virus companies have all created antidotes since then, but thousands of users who may not have installed an anti-virus software are still vulnerable.

The last episode showed that of the over 500,000 affected computers worldwide, a large number seemed to be based in India, Peru and Turkey — which is why Indian PC owners need to be specially careful to activate and update anti-virus tools before opening e-mails on Friday, and not open unknown email attachments. However as viruses go, Symantec, makers of Norton classify it as a category 2 threat, on a scale of 1 to 5. Trend Micro says the virus could also "freeze" mouse and keyboard.

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