For those who haven’t updated their virus signatures and perform a full system scan, I suppose it’s a good time to do it now. With probably over 300,000 infections worldwide, the Blackmal/Nymex virus is programmed to start deleting eleven different types of files on the third of each month, starting with Friday, February 3 2006. More information available from SecurityFocus and F-Secure.

When Nyxem activates, it will overwrite all of your DOC/XLS/PPT/ZIP/RAR/PDF/MDB files. This is nasty, as this is done on all mounted drives, ie. any drive that has a drive letter. So it might affect your USB thumb drives, external hard drives and network drives! Also, if you’re taking daily automatic backups you might end up backing up the corrupted files over good files.
The number of machines that have been infected by this worm is over 300,000. Many of those have been disinfected already, though. But thousands of computers will get their files overwritten on February 3rd - most of them in India, Turkey and Peru.

This is what you get when the virus hits you:

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Linux/Open Source [t], Microsoft Network [t]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.