Evaman the everyman of worms

Symantec senior technical director Tim Hartman said as yet, the security company rated Evaman only a category two threat (the highest being level five) and acknowledged the worm was not as widespread in Australia as previously expected.

"So far, we haven't seen huge submission numbers to it. We believe that there is a chance that it could break out bigger than it currently is but we don't think its going to be huge," Hartman said.

In some media reports, the virus has been likened to mass-mailer MyDoom, which clogged mail servers and slowed down computers.

Evaman, which spreads to addresses found at the Web site email.people.yahoo.com, arrives as an attachment with a .exe or.scr extension. Infected e-mails generally have subject headings such as "failed transaction or "failure delivery".

Hartman said Symantec was currently waiting for the UK and US week to start in order to see the impact of the Evaman virus overseas.