The name caught everyone’s attention. Consequently a virus that was designed to start its malicious work on Friday didn’t cause the anticipated mayhem.
The worm, known as “Blackmal” or (more saucily) “Kama Sutra”, hides inside e-mail attachments and was due to execute on the third day of each month, the first falling on Friday. Once activated, the worm will try to spread itself, attempt to stop anti-worm software from running and try to delete all Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF file types from an infected PC.
Rather than disabling up to 500,000 PCs, as expected, the virus had hit only a few thousand computers by midday Friday in continental Europe, mostly individual desktops.Advance warnings by security software companies appeared to have worked.”This is certainly not a disaster,” said Sophos technical consultant Graham Cluley.at British virus fighter firm. Rival security provider Symantec confirmed “the worm is not spreading wildly and infections are relatively low.”
The only big incident was in Milan. The discovery came too late. Technicians switched off 10,000 city government computers after discovering the infection on Thursday and deciding they didn’t have enough time to clean the machines.The”CME-24″ worm won the nickname of the Hindu love manual Kama Sutra because of the pornographic come-ons in e-mails spreading it. The US Department of Homeland Security is attempting to unify naming through the Common Malware Enumeration, or CME.
