Antivirus companies are warning about the emergence of two new worms, one of which uses XP's speech function to talk, while the other sniffs out passwords. . . .
The first worm, known as Amus, spreads using addresses found in the Microsoft Outlook address book. E-mails that carry the worm have a subject line that says "Listen and Smile" and the body of the e-mail contains the words "Hey. I beg your pardon. You must listen."

If a user executes the attachment, masum.exe, the worm generates a short message in a robotic female voice, using Windows XP's built-in speech capabilities. "How are you. I am back. My name is Mr Hamsi. I am seeing you. Haaaaaaaa. You must come to Turkey. I am cleaning your computer. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 0. Gule gule," it says. "Gule gule" is Turkish for "bye bye," and hamsi is a small anchovy-like fish found in the Black Sea.

If the virus is activated on the 10th or 23rd day of the month, the worm will attempt to delete all INI files from the Windows folder. If the day of the month is the 2nd, 15th or 17th, the worm will attempt to delete all DLL files from the Windows folder.

The other worm that antivirus companies have issued a warning about is a new variant of the Sdbot mass-mailing worm that installs a network sniffer in order to grab unencrypted passwords.

The link for this article located at Ciaran Buckley is no longer available.