First worm of New Year strikes

More people likely to open messages over New Year period

An email worm disguised as a New Year's greeting is spreading rapidly across the internet.

The worm-laden messages are titled 'Happy New Year' and contain an attachment called either postcard.exe, or postcard.zip, according to experts at VeriSign's iDefense Labs.

'The period of greatest risk is through New Year's Day, when antivirus protection is the lowest for this new threat and users are most apt to click on a holiday-related message,' said Ken Dunham, director of the Rapid Response Team at iDefense Labs.

'Everyone should be on guard for e-mails and other content potentially harboring malicious code during the holiday period,' he said.

If the attachment is opened, malicious software is downloaded from the Internet and can infect computers running Windows operating systems.

Once a computer is infected, the worm begins spamming mail to infect other computers. The worm is already moving quickly across the Internet, at a rate of five emails per second on at least one large network, according to the iDefense Labs Web site.

Security experts say that although the virus looks similar to the Warezov Trojan horse that has plagued the Internet for the past month, it is actually a new variant of the worm. More than 160 email servers are used by the worm to send out spam to potential victims, Dunham said.

High volumes of mass emails are usually sent around the holidays. The spike in holiday spam is largely attributed to the fact that people have been more likely to open the messages.

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