A new mass-mailing worm that spread through Australia overnight appears to have hit the UK hard on Monday morning and is spreading into the United States,” reports Matt Loney for ZDNet (UK). “The Palyh, or Mankx worm, appears to come from support-at-microsoft.com, a forged address. It contains a file which, upon execution, self-propagates using e-mail addresses from files stored on the targeted system, but which can also spread to other Windows machines on a LAN.”
“Although the file has a .PI or .PIF extension, it is a .EXE file, and because Windows processes files according to their internal structure than their extension, Windows runs the file as soon as the user double clicks on it,” reports Loney. Full article here.
Macintosh computers do not run .EXE files and are therefore unaffected. However, Mac users should take care to delete these messages and not forward them to Windows users in order to help stop the spread of this worm.