Kamasutra Virus Strikes:

Sex sells and the new internet worm (Nyxem-E) nick-named the "Kama Sutra worm" because it spreads under the guise of pornographic content, has leap-frogged lesser viruses reaching top-spot on world virus charts.

Nyxem-E aka Kama Sutra is a mass-mailing worm which attempts to disable security-related and file-sharing software and destroys files of certain types. When run on a Windows PC, the worm copies itself to shared network locations, and sends itself to e-mail addresses found on the target computer. Nyxem-E, according to F-Secure, is programmed to disable anti-virus and firewall software, and delete certain files including Office documents, on the third day of every month.

The Kama Sutra worm arrives as an e-mail attachment, with different subject lines including "School girl fantasies gone bad," "The Best Videoclip Ever," "A Great Video," "give me a kiss," "Fwd: Photo," "Fw: Sexy," "You Must View This Videoclip!" "Miss Lebanon 2006," etc. The text differs; it may include references to the Kama Sutra - the ancient Sanskrit book on sex and related matters.

F-Secure has reported a steady stream of Nyxem worms from all over the world, and has said that at last call the worm showed 510,000 infected systems.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos, said that the Kama Sutra worm uses a dated technique to entice users by promising pornography, and that the worm lacks the sophistication of recent Trojan horse-style viruses.

Security experts have advised users to keep their anti-virus software up-to-date, and be wary whilst opening e-mail attachments.

Kama Sutra Virus Causes Little: Damage

The worm, known as "Blackmal" and "Kama Sutra," hides inside email attachments and contains a time-activated payload due to execute on the third day of each month, first occurring 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 that were expected to be infected, the virus had hit only a few thousand computers by midday in continental Europe, mostly from individual consumers, according to several computer security firms.

Advance warnings by virus security firms and enterprises to their customers and employees appeared to have worked.

"This is certainly not a disaster," said technical consultant Graham Cluley at British virus fighter firm Sophos.

Rival security software firm Symantec confirmed "the worm is not spreading wildly and infections are relatively low."

The virus is also known as "Nyxem," "MyWife," and "Tearec."