Antivirus vendors are warning companies in the UK to be on their alert after reports about a new worm dubbed Shockwave is spreading from the US and Australia. It is not considered particularly damaging, however more of a nuisance as it could clog up corporate e-mail systems if allowed to spread quickly.

The worm, once again attaches to e-mails and is known by the names of TROJ _Shockwave.a and W32.Prolin.Worm with the subject line A great Shockwave flash movie with the body text of Check out this new flash movie that I downloaded just now..... It's Great, Bye.

The effect this worm will have once executed will be to try and cause maximum disturbance by changing the names of JPEG and ZIP files and then moving them to the C: directory. It will also create a text file that warns users that all their data could have been destroyed. The Author also advises that they switch from using Microsoft Windows to the Unix-based operating system Linux.

This virus then finishes by signing with 'The Penguin' and sends an e-mail to [email protected] with the subject line, 'Job Complete' and a message stating Got yet another idiot.

The message is simply that if you receive an unsolicited e-mail, do not run it. The idea of this latest worm is working on the fact that many people will want to see the movie as they click on the attachment.

Symantec have also reported a low-risk worm called Afeto which is similar to Navidad earlier reported by TrainingZONE in https://www.trainingzone.co.uk/item/32264 which is another low-risk worm where it arrives through Microsoft Outlook and attaches itself to e-mail. It triggers when it is in memory and a document is open. It will also soft JPEG graphics files that are less than 200,000 bytes in size and then attaches various JPEG files together until the file size is 50,000 bytes.

It will then send itself as an attachment to every list in the Outlook address book of the infected user.