A mass-mailing Internet worm that purports to offer New Year greetings was spreading rapidly Wednesday, and is rumored to be the big Christmas virus that antivirus companies have been gearing up for.

The worm, arrives with the subject header "Happy New Year"
and contains a file attachment entitled "christmas.exe."

It uses familiar social engineering tactics to entice recipients to double click on the attachment, before mailing itself and the victim's contact list to everyone in the contact's address book.

The worm arrives with the body text: "I can't describe my feelings But all i can say is Happy New Year :-) Bye."

Once the Christmas.exe application is opened, the worm will modify the user's Internet Explorer (IE) home page so that the browser now points to a malicious Web site. This site will then exploit a vulnerability in IE and run a Visual Basic Script on the infected computer that will attempt to delete significant portions of the Windows operating system.

According to reports, Symantec believes the worm also spreads via Microsoft's Instant Messaging software, and will try to delete antivirus software from an infected PC.

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2833821,00.html

Oh bye the way, as usual it looks like those of you running Netscape or Opera are immune, but keep your virus software running, some day there might be one written for us.