Another variant of the MyLife worm, MyLife.j, has hit Australia. The concern is now focussed on how rapidly these variants are appearing.

Andrew Gordon, managed services architect at anti-virus software vendor Trend Micro, said he has seen quite a few variants of MyLife coming through over the past couple of weeks and is concerned about the MyLife family of worms because there had been new variants at the pace of one or two a week recently.

The most recent, MyLife.j, came with the attachment renamed usa.scr.

-We obviously quite often get many variants, but it has been very quick," Gordon said.

Part of this, Gordon suggests, is that MyLife is a well-crafted worm in contrast to those which are written by amateurs or people using tools they have found on the Internet.

-[This worm] is written quite well and that's why people have taken this one as a cookie cutter," Gordon said. -You don't have to be a wonderbrain to be a virus writer these days."

Likewise, Stuart Palmer, managing director of Sophos in Australia, agreed there had been a number of variants of the MyLife worm and he believes that users had been smart in spotting a similar pattern in these worms.

Sophos had used its Australian lab to work out detection algorithms and disinfection routines for the MyLife.b and MyLife.h variants.

Sean McDonald, virus analyst at Sophos, said the MyLife worm was written in a Visual Basic, as opposed to a lot of parasitic viruses which may be written in assembly languages.

-Some of the variants have had quite devastating payloads," McDonald said. -[But} this is basically the run-of-the-mill worm."

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