/ 17 December 2004

A virus for Christmas

An internet virus disguised as an electronic greeting card was spreading on Thursday across the world, duping e-mail users with a ”Merry Christmas” message that automatically appears in their native language.

The Zafi-D virus infected 10% of e-mail on the net, according to anti-virus firm Sophos, though the vast majority of these messages were automatically filtered out by anti-virus software.

The majority of infected computers were in South America and Europe, and as usual it was confined to computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

The e-mail arrives with a subject line of ”Merry Christmas” in one of 15 languages, depending on the final suffix of the targeted e-mail address.

The body of the message says ”Happy holidays”, again in one of 15 languages, and the actual virus is contained in an attachment to the message. If clicked open, the virus sends itself to every address stored in the user’s e-mail programme.

The worm is the fourth variation of the Zafi worm. Computer experts warned users to avoid opening any unexpected e-mail attachments whose contents are not verifiable. — Sapa-DPA