As many as 80,000 computer systems in India and about a million across the world have been estimated hit on Friday by the mass mailing worm Nymex that wrecks computers using the Windows operating system.
The virus with aliases such as Blackmal, Mywife, Kamasutra, grew and its variants has infected 80,000 systems in India," government officials here said.
They said the virus, which would strike on third of every month, had done all the damage it could have done by noon.
The worm infects systems using windows operating systems and can corrupt all documents with the file formats like .dmp, .doc, .mdb, .mde, .pdf, .psd, .ppt, .pps, .rar, .xls and .zip.
The worm came to light early December, Gulshan Rai, Director of Indian Computer Emergence Response Team (CERT) of the Department of Information Technology said. He, however, refused to confirm the number of infected systems in India.
Rai said cert had sent out an advisory to 800 organisations on January 23rd to protect their computer systems against the worm.
Top computer security firms like trend micro and McAfee have classified the virus as a low threat and provided protection to their clients well in advance.
"We had provided protection against the worm to our users by January 16 and none of our customers have reported that any of their computer systems have been infected by the worm," Niraj Kaushik, head of India operations of Trend Micro said.
Kaushik said the businesses who typically buy genuine anti-virus software would have got an upgrade to protect against the attack but in the consumer segment the risk of infection was highest as most of the users had pirated software and therefore they got no upgrades.
Kaushik said the exact figure of attacks by the worm would be difficult to get as most of the companies would not like to disclose security breaches while in consumer segment this data was hard to collect.
"Some estimates suggest that one million computers worldwide have been infected by the worm but the figures for India are not available," he added.
Shahani, director- sales, India at McAfee's India operations also said none of the company's customers had reported security breaches.
"Only protection against the worm is effective anti-virus system. We have provided our customers with upgraded versions of our anti-virus software," he said.
Sahani said though there were many versions of anti-virus software that were available free they did not guarantee fool-proof protection.
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