Shockwave virus hits Europe

A new virus believed to have been spread by fans of the Linux operating system has hit several major European businesses.

Claiming to be an animation in the popular Shockwave format, the worm has been branded as a high risk by antivirus vendor Network Associates, and a medium risk by other vendors including Symantec, Kaspersky Labs, Trend Micro and Sophos.

Developed by a hacker going by the name of The Penguin, it arrives attached to an email with the subject line: "A great Shockwave Flash movie." Once the program is run, the virus emails itself to everyone in the user's Outlook address book.

The program copies itself to the root directory of the C: drive and to the Windows start-up folder. It then sends the message "Got yet another idiot" to a yahoo.com email address.

Finally, it searches local hard drives for files with .Zip and .JPG extensions, and moves them to the C: directory, adding "change at least now to Linux" to the file names. As far as it is known, the worm does not change the content of the files, just the file names.

Vendors have warned that there is likely to be an increase in the number of virus infections in the run-up to Christmas as authors try to capitalise on festive staff dropping their guard. Worms based on Christmas cards and Christmas carols have already been seen.

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