Tech Shout!

Security company Sophos has discovered a new worm that’s been wiggling away in the wild. On a serious note, this worm hunts through the computer’s hard disks and deletes MP3 media files.

In fact, Graham Cluely, a senior technology consultant at Sophos and more notably known as the company’s most vocal worm-hunter, has said this in a statement, “The authors of this worm are more likely to be teenage mischief makers than the organized criminal gangs we typically see authoring financially-motivated malware these days. As such, it’s not something we would lose an awful lot of sleep over, but there are some lessons that computer users should learn to minimize the chances of infection.”

Security experts have also seconded Cluely’s opinion that this new MP3-deleting worm is just a low risk one. However, they did mention that it could possibly become a menace for those who are music lovers, as it removes his/her entire music collection on the computer.

It is now known that the MP3-deleting worm has been designed to spread through flash drives so as to bypass email filters.

Symantec, another security company has named this worm ‘W32.DeleteMusic’. The company added that the worm creates an autorun file to start itself whenever a user accesses a drive.

Symantec has warned that the Win32.DeleteMusic MP3-eating worm affects PCs that run on Windows 2000, 95, 98, Me, NT, Server 2003, XP and even Vista.

Cluely advises user to disable the autorun feature in Windows that automatically launches programs on CDs and USB drives.

Although, as of now, the motivation of the hackers who created the MP3-deleting worm are not yet known.

This MP3-deleting worm that spreads through flash drives is reminiscent of the way viruses spread via floppy disks some several decades ago.