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New Delhi: As many as 80,000 computer systems in India and about a million across the world have been estimated hit on Friday by the mass mailing worm 'Nyxem.E' that wrecks computers using the Windows operating system.
"The virus with aliases such as Blackmaal, MyWife, KamaSutra and its variants has infected 80,000 systems in India," government officials in New Delhi said.
They said that the virus, which would strike on third of every month, had done all the damage it could have done by noon.
The worm infects systems using Windows operating systems and can corrupt all documents with the file formats like .dmp, .doc, .mdb, .mde, .pdf, .psd, .ppt, .pps, .rar, .xls and .zip.
Gulshan Rai, Director of Indian Computer Emergence Response Team (CERT) of the Department of Information Technology said that the worm came to light early on December. However, he refused to confirm the number of infected systems in India.
Rai said that CERT had sent out an advisory to 800 organisations on January 23rd to protect their computer systems against the worm.
Top computer security firms like Trend Micro and McAfee have classified the virus as a low threat and provided protection to their clients well in advance.
"We had provided protection against the worm to our users by January 16 and none of our customers have reported that any of their computer systems have been infected by the worm," Trend Micro, Head of India Operations Niraj Kaushik said.
"Some estimates suggest that one million computers worldwide have been infected by the worm but the figures for India are not available," he added.
Many systems operating for several companies have already taken adequate steps to ward trouble and have been cautioned against e-mail with JPEG and an attachment.
The US's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had already sent out a warning about the virus that destroys files or infects computers on the third day of each month.
Mapping the Menace
On Thursday night, F-Secure, an antivirus software vendor, got web access statistics listing all the IP addresses that have accessed the Nyxem counter.
After filtering out the addresses of bots that have been hammering the counter lately, F-Secure used their worldmap technology to map the addresses to a map. The images below are a graphic representation of a global view of the machines that may run into trouble unless they are disinfected.
Nyxem.E hits 80,000 systems in India
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