Zafi Worm Strikes, Spikes

Zafi.b, which spreads primarily via e-mail but can also infect shared folders created by peer-to-peer file-sharing software, is based on an April worm originally written in Hungarian. This variant, however, can arrive in English, German, Swedish, Italian, Russian, or Spanish, depending on the top-level mail domain targeted. Typically, the payload is packed into a .pif file.

Network Associates, for instance, upgraded its threat level for Zafi.b to "Medium" early Monday as submissions started to spike.

"Fortunately, it doesn't look like a long-term worm," said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of Network Associates' AVERT research team. "Give it a couple of days and it'll disappear."

For the moment, however, Zafi is leading several anti-virus vendors' hit parades.

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"Zafi.b has accounted for over 60 per cent of the reports to Sophos' global network of monitoring stations over the last 24 hours, making it the most widespread e-mail worm at the moment," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, in a statement.

Rival anti-virus company F-Secure, meanwhile, said Zafi.b topped its current virus list by accounting for 43.2 percent of all malicious code detected in the last 24 hours.

"Zafi.b's able to spread, I think, because of its multi-language format," said Gullotto, "and because it uses a .pif file as an attachment. There are still a lot of people out there who don't understand [the danger of] opening .pif files.

But while Gullotto added that Zafi.b should be taken seriously -- in part because it sniffs out firewall and anti-virus program executables and overwrites them with a copy of itself, disabling defenses -- it's not the biggest worm threat on the Net at the moment. That "honor" still belongs to Netsky, which has put more than a score of variants in the wild since it first appeared in February.

"We're still seeing a ton of Netsky.d and Netsky.p," said Gullotto.

Netsky variants held seven of the top ten spots in F-Secure's up-to-the-minute virus list, and accounted for 41.6 percent of all malicious code spotted during the past 24 hours.