E-Holiday Card Virus Packs Ugly Punch

Manifested Destiny: "A new virus strain masquerading as electronic Christmas cards is accounting for one in every 10 e-mails hitting in-boxes, security experts warned Wednesday.

The W32/Zafi-D worm, which originated in Hungary, is using mass-mailing and P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques to squirm through in-boxes and slow network traffic to a crawl.
The worm, which poses as a Christmas greeting, has the ability to replicate in as many as 19 languages, which makes it a 'very serious threat' to computer users worldwide, said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos Inc.
Cluley told eWEEK.com the Zafi-D mutant accounts for 75 percent of all virus reports at coming into the company's monitoring stations in the past 24 hours.
A spokeswoman for e-mail security services firm MessageLabs said the company had intercepted more than 1 million copies of Zafi-D since it first started squirming Tuesday.
'This one is spreading far and wide because it uses multiple languages. The worm has been programmed to change its disguise and communicate in the language of the target. That makes it a bigger threat,' Cluley said.
According to a Sophos advisory, the worm arrives with the subject line 'Merry Christmas,' 'Buon Natale!' or 'Joyeux Noel!,' depending on the location of the recipient....[more..]