Most of you will have noticed in the last few days at least

that the Kama Sutra worm (AKA Nyxem-E or Blackmal) has been hyped as the first big security threat

of 2006.  The worm, as with all other

worms will try to spread itself by scanning an infected users contacts and

mailing itself out to them, it also spreads itself across unsecured shares and

tries to disable firewall/anti-virus products. 

Pretty standard stuff—the worm destroys DOC, XLS, MDB, MDE, PPT, PPS,

ZIP, RAR, PDF, PSD and DMP files on the 3rd of each month by

replacing any data with the string “DATA

Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 K5]”. 

Due to the fact that we have quite a few roaming users, moving between

multiple international offices, hotels and so on, I was expecting to have at

least one or two infected users.

We actually had no reported infections or any strange

behaviour; is all of this talk simply scaremongering on the part of anti-virus

firms?  Has anyone had problems with this

worm, or any similarly hyped ‘outbreaks’?