New worm crawling through blogs?!

I spotted it on Christopher Boyd's Vital Security blog. Chris is a Microsoft security MVP and security research manager at FaceTime, an instant messaging security company. However, this worm appears to have spread much further and has slithered around the world.

The worm is actually an animated GIF image. Bloggers all over have embedded it in their blogs and link to the creator's Web site.To infect your blog, you have to copy and paste a piece of HTML code into your blog.

This is funny, but on the flipside, however, there could be some security implications if the hoster of this "worm" decided to upload a malicious image that took control of the PC's that visit sites that show it. (Or if the hoster's site was hacked.)

"There are no malicious plans with the blog worm," said Robin Schuil, its creator, in an e-mail. "However, it is a self mutating worm. From day to day it will say different things."

Still, as a precaution, we're hosting Thursday's version of the worm on our own servers. If you want to see it mutate, you will have to go to Robin's page.