A new variant of the Frethem worm is attacking e-mail users and
threatening to overload e-mail gateways.
The worm does not cause any direct damage to the user's PC and uses
its own e-mail engine to replicate itself to a user's contacts from
their Outlook address book.
Anti-virus special MessageLabs said it had seen 174 copies in the
past nine hours. According to Mark Toshack, virus analyst at
MessageLabs, the virus started in Indonesia and has spread across
the world.
The UK, the US and the Netherlands had the most infections,
according to statistics from MessageLabs.
Toshack said the worm exploits an old vulnerability in Internet
Explorer where an attachment opens automatically whenever a user
previews an e-mail.
Microsoft had released a patch on 29 March 2001, but Toshack said
there were still a number of users who had not loaded the patch.
"People with the older versions have not bothered to update," he
said. Anyone running the latest IE software is automatically
protected.