Kama Sutra / Blackmal / Mywife / Nyxem Worm on February 3

A new worm / virus is set to strike computers and networks worldwide on February 3. It is named the KamaSutra Virus or Blackworm / Mywife / Nyxem-E etc.

CNET News had warned of this on a 26 January post

“The virus, dubbed Nyxem.E among other names, was first reported on Jan. 16. It is thought to have infected more than half a million PCs. Security vendor IronPort warned Thursday that these machines are now hard-coded to propagate the virus on Feb. 3.

Companies are unlikely to be directly affected if they are running up-to-date antivirus software, because the major antivirus vendors have now released patches. But IronPort warned that companies could experience secondary effects, as the virus tries to propagate itself by harvesting e-mail addresses on an infected machine.”

CNN warns about this virus effects today

“Experts say Windows Office documents, Word documents, Excel spread sheets, and PDFs (portable document format) are among the files that will be “overwritten.” That means the data will be changed and corrupted, and the original information will no longer be accessible.

While files that have simply been deleted can sometimes be recovered; overwritten files are usually lost for good.”

Yahoo News breaks the story

“With subject lines that read “the best videoclip ever,” “give me a kiss,” and “sch*ol girl f*ntasies gone bad,” the worm entices computer users to open the attached file.

“This worm feeds on people’s willingness to receive salacious content on their desktop computer, but they could be putting their entire company’s data at risk,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.”

The F-Secure site says in a post Nyxem email worm offers trouble in store

“In late January, an email worm called Nyxem.E started spreading in computers around the globe but its main payload is yet to drop. Nyxem is also known as Blackworm, Kama Sutra or Mywife. The Common Malware Enumeration (CME) reference for it is CME-24. For those computers infected by Nyxem.E, next Friday and every third day of the month will see the worm replacing the content of a broad range of user’s files with a text string “DATA Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 K5]“. Among these files are: DOC, XLS, MDB, MDE, PPT, PPS, ZIP, RAR, PDF, PSD and DMP. The deadline of the Nyxem.E worm is, however, based on the clock of the infected machine meaning that the worm has already claimed its first victims.”

Symantec which makes the Norton Antivirus calls it W32.Blackmal.E@mm

“A mass-mailing worm that attempts to spread through network shares and lower security settings. On the third day of every month it attempts to rewrite files with certain extensions with custom text.”

“Also Known As: CME-24, Win32.Blackmal.F [Computer Associates], Email-Worm.Win32.Nyxem.e [F-Secure], Email-Worm.Win32.Nyxem.e [Kaspersky], W32/MyWife.d@MM [McAfee], W32/MyWife.d@MM!M24 [McAfee], Win32/Mywife.E@mm [Microsoft], W32/Small.KI@mm [Norman], Tearec.A [Panda Software], W32/Nyxem-D [Sophos], WORM_GREW.{A, B} [Trend Micro] “

So there is a no shortage of names for this computer virus / worm. However, it is time to back up your important documents. Update your antivirus subscriptions and keep your antivirus software scanner on and active. Do not click on emails luring you to click on untrusted attachments and protect yourself from this worm!