A new Internet worm, dubbed Netsky.D, was on Monday spreading quickly throughout the world and could soon overtake the Mydoom.A and Sobig.F viruses in proliferation, Internet security experts said.
"It's spreading globally, and really fast, and much faster than anything we have seen before," said Mikko Hyppoenen, in charge of anti-virus research at Finnish Internet security firm F-Secure.
But aside from spreading rapidly, Netsky.D does not harm computers, he said.
Hyppoenen said it was initially distributed through a huge amount of spam e-mails to thousands of e-mail addresses in just a few minutes on Monday.
Its "success" was also due to Netsky.D's ability to search for e-mail addresses to send itself to on machines connected through corporate networks to contaminated machines.
"So through infecting just one computer, it can get hold of all e-mail addresses stored on a corporate computer network, maybe some 50,0000 in all, from just a single infected machine," Hyppoenen noted.
While the now infamous Mydoom.A worm in late January and last year's Sobig.F virus generated a million infected e-mails in their first 24 hours, Netsky.D had on Monday already surpassed the 200,000 mark in just hours, experts said.
In comparison to those viruses however, which opened up infected machines to outside hackers and collected e-mail addresses for spam purposes, Netsky.D was not damaging computers, Hyppoenen noted.
"It's not deleting any files, or attacking anybody. It will just overload web servers with infected e-mails and play a funny tune on the infected computers," he said.
From 06:00 to 08:59 on March 2, irrespective of time zone, the worm will make contaminated computers play a continuous jingle through their loudspeakers, noted Snorre Fagerland, virus analyst with Norwegian Internet security firm Norman.
But by giving itself away like that, however, it was likely Netsky.D was the work of a hobby virus writer rather than some professional with malicious intent, he added.
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