In its present form, BubbleBoy is benign and merely uses the infected email client to spread to all addresses in the user's address book. Security experts have warned that variants of the BubbleBoy email worm virus could soon be in the wild.
Sal Viveros, director of marketing for McAfee, said the reason the worm has been so successful is because it hides in a.scr file, which many firms do not filter and many consumers do not expect to contain viruses.
Anti-virus vendor Sophos said the worm can extract email addresses from web pages on the hard drive as well as from the Microsoft Outlook address book. UK businesses are being put on alert over another worm, known as Maldal-I.
Users will know they have been hit when the message "You have been infected by the ShakiraPics Worm" appears on their screen. If the user runs the attachment the message forwards itself to every name in the users' Microsoft Outlook address book.
The worm arrives in the form of .exe or .scr attachments with a variety of subject lines and messages. It uses its own SMTP engine to email itself to all contacts in the Windows address book, MSN Messenger, .Net Messenger, Yahoo Pager and files...
People who join the information network give the company access to the phone numbers, addresses and emails of the individuals listed in their Microsoft Outlook contact list. Plaxo's information networking application attempts to take the pain out...
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