Clock Ticking for Nyxem Virus

DoddyUK writes "The BBC is reporting that the countdown has begun for the Nyxem virus. On February 3rd, common documents such as MS Word, Excel or Powerpoint will be overwritten on infected machines. Over 300,000 machines have been infected thus far, the main method of infection being the promise of porn in unsolicited emails."

Comments

The motive?

[antifoidulus]

From the article:"It shows a certain intelligence in its design but what's the motive?" he asked, "Pure vandalism does not ring true these days."

Maybe economic chaos? The virus goes after MS Office files and pdfs, the files that are 9/10 the most economically valuable on a PC. I wonder what the impact of getting rid of massive amounts of these files would be?
On the plus side, lazy grad students can now say, "The virus ate my thesis" :P

Re:The motive?

[Zocalo]

That's kind of what I was thinking too, what with the reported increase in on-line extortion of the "pay us money or suffer a DDoS" type and all. You could mass mail some destructive worm like Nyxem, see which IPs phoned home to report an infection, and if see evidence of a signicant outbreak in a big network offer to disable the thing via it's control channel for a "small" fee. It's getting a little close to the wire for effective blackmail based around Nyxem though, unless such attempts have not been made public of course...

I have to admit I've been kind of hoping for something like Nyxem that wipes out data would come along for a while now. After all the mainstream media coverage of such worms and trojans, all of which have preached the "don't click on the attachment" line, there is simply no excuse for this kind of thing. Sure, there's not a lot that the less IT aware members of the population are going to be able to do about a 0-day exploit like the recent GDI vulnerability, but a mass-mailing and P2P worm? It's harsh, but I think that losing all their documents is the only way that the IT security message is going to reach some people, and if that wakes them up to more involved stuff as well, then so much the better.