Thanks Betabuzz of Beta Buzz. A mass-mailing Internet worm that purports to offer New Year greetings was spreading rapidly Wednesday, and is rumored to be the big Christmas virus that antivirus companies have been gearing up for.
The first copy of the virus was detected at 7:23am GMT by security firm MessageLabs and is said to have originated from South Africa. By using a number of aliases, the e-mail worm has spread virulently throughout the day. MessageLabs has detected 925 incidents of the worm at an Internet level to date, from a number of countries across the globe.
"This won"t be as big as Goner, but it is likely to be the biggest Christmas virus," said Alex Shipp, antivirus technology expert at MessageLabs.
The worm, operating under the guises of Zacker, Reeezak, Maldal and Keyluc, arrives with the subject header "Happy New Year" and contains a file attachment entitled "christmas.exe." It uses familiar social engineering tactics to entice recipients to double click on the attachment, before mailing itself and the victim"s contact list to everyone in the contact"s address book.