NEW YORK: The first of the worms in the new year has recorded its presence. An email worm, in the form of a New Year's greeting, is likely to land in your mailbox and security experts advise you not to open a mail which has a title 'Happy New Year' and contains an attachment named postcard.exe, or postcard.zip.
Ken Dunham, director of the Rapid Response Team at iDefense Labs of VeriSign, said the greatest risk posed by the worm appeared to be during the New Year's day, when antivirus protection could be at the lowest for this new threat and users tended to open a greetings message.
If the attachment is opened by mistake, the malware will get downloaded from the internet, which will infect the computers, if it is running Windows operating system. The worm then starts spamming mail to infect other computers.
Security experts said the worm appeared to be similar to the Warezov Trojan horse that infected the internet in the past one month, but it is a new variant of the worm. Dunham estimates that more than 160 email servers are now being used by the worm to send out spam to likely victims.
Security experts also warned that the Happy New Year worm is not recognized by all virus scanners.
