Worm alert: Maldal-I wriggling its way to an inbox near you...

NEWS UK businesses are being put on alert over another worm, known as Maldal-I. Anti-virus specialists have recorded several sightings of the worm, a variant of Maldal-D, which was originally seen in the wild earlier this year. Both worms spread as an .exe attachment, and arrive in in-boxes with many different email subject lines. The body text of the email is usually blank and the file name of the attachment is most likely to be PROGRAM.EXE. Anti-virus vendor Sophos said the worm can extract email addresses from web pages on the hard drive as well as from the Microsoft Outlook address book. It tries to send copies of itself to any of these addresses. The original Maldal-D virus tried to disable any anti-virus software running on the infected machine, but its variant is not as destructive. However, Sophos has urged companies to update their anti-virus software.