Kama Sutra worm threat shrivels
Virtually no damage caused yet; likely won't become a disaster, tech security specialists say.
The worm, also known as Nyxem.E, MyWife and Blackworm, has been circulating for a couple of weeks, and antivirus vendors said businesses have done well to ensure that their networks were protected against the pest.
There have been "no reports of any (Kama Sutra) detonations so far. Also, the virus seems to be dropping in e-mail prevalence. It was down to second place yesterday, according to our monitoring stations, and slid again into third place today," Paul Ducklin, head of technology at Sophos Asia-Pacific, told ZDNet Australia.
The worm's ranking was overtaken by MyDoom and Netsky variants, which have been around for a number of years.
"It seems reasonable to assume that Nyxem (Kama Sutra) isn't going to be the disaster that some local speculation may have suggested," Ducklin added.
McAfee Asia-Pacific shared Ducklin's view. "No local outbreaks reported, and very few reports of infections. Most companies are seeing the virus at the gateway, but not in large numbers--typically a few hundred viruses are blocked," McAfee marketing director Allan Bell said.
Although no outbreaks have been officially reported, the Internet Storm Center noted some "unconfirmed" reports of damage have arisen in India.
Security experts at F-Secure said that home users will most likely be the ones affected by the worm and, as a result, will not be hit until they boot up their computers after coming home from work.
"The full scope of the problem won't come to light until during the weekend or early next week," according to a posting by Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's chief research officer.
Munir Kotadia of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney. CNET News.com's Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.