Computer virus alert |03 February 2006

"Blackworm", said SPACE Marketing manager Jaya Nair, "spreads conventionally through peer-to-peer networks, network shares and email attachments".

The virus reproduces itself onto the computer system under names such as "The Best Video Clip Ever", "Give Me a Kiss" and "FWD: Photo".

Mr Nair said the unknown individuals who have designed the virus did it so that it turns up on the third of every month. Its goal is to overwrite word documents, excel and other files with popular extensions.

In fact, today, February 3, the maleware – the infected software – will turn on its host system committing widespread damage to data and programme files throughout the system.

Noting that the outbreak in Seychelles was discovered a few months back, Mr Nair said so far no specialised efforts have taken effect in an attempt to alleviate the problem.

Americans however, are trying to trace its source.
At the moment, some 300,000 computers are being affected throughout the world on a weekly basis. Other than the worm's destructive behaviour, it also uses a time bomb and an HTTP-based counter to keep track of how many copies of itself are up and running on the Internet.

Some have suggested that the counter is not necessarily reliable and may have been tampered with in order to exaggerate the extent of the threat.

Nevertheless, Seychellois are advised to be prudent and take reasonable precautions by avoiding unfamiliar pop-up windows.

The blackworm has aliases such as Authentium, Fortinet, F-secure, Grisoft, Kaspersky, Sophos and McAfee.

Mr Nair is advising Seychellois to run an anti-virus software (keeping it up to date) and run periodic static scans of the system in order to detect future attacks.