p2p news / p2pnet: The Nyxem.E mass-mailing worm is slated to attack on February 3, based on the clock of the infected machine. And that means depending on what’s happening with your computer’s time arrangements, it could strike at any time.

And that’s what’s happening.

When Nyxem.E goes live, it’ll overwrite all DOC/XLS/PPT/ZIP/RAR/PDF/MDB files, says F-Secure’s Mikko Hyppönen, going on:

"This is nasty, as this is done on all mounted drives, ie. any drive that has a drive letter. So it might affect your USB thumb drives, external hard drives and network drives!

"Also, if you’re taking daily automatic backups you might end up backing up the corrupted files over good files.

Meanwhile, F-Secue is already receiving reports from users who’ve had files on their system overwritten by Nyxem.E, it says.

"The number of machines that have been infected by this worm is over 300,000. Many of those have been disinfected already, though. But thousands of computers will get their files overwritten on February 3rd – most of them in India, Turkey and Peru.

"This worm family has been around since March 2004. The worm is named "Nyxem" because the original Nyxem.A variant launched a DDoS attack against the New York Mercantile Exchange website (www.nymex.com).

"We don’t know why."

F-Secure has a disinfectant free tool available for free. Go here for a download.

Also See:
F-Secure – First reports of Nyxem damage, January 31, 2006

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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