Andrew Gordon, managed service architect at antivirus software vendor Trend Micro, said it had seen limited impact from Klez in Australia, and was expecting things to remain quiet.
Gordon said that although the worm had been given a low-risk rating in Australia, it was still very destructive. The variant kicked in early this morning, with Trend Micro's monitoring systems showing the greatest impact in regions such as Europe.
Paul Ducklin, head of global support at vendor Sophos Anti-Virus, said he would not describe the current impact of the Klez variant as an epidemic.
He said the interesting thing about Klez was that it mailed itself out and could run automatically, rather than requiring the user to double-click on the attachment. However, Ducklin added that this was only possible if attention hadn't been paid to security updates for Internet software.
Ducklin said that there seemed to be a feeling in some quarters that anti-virus protection was a kind of fit and forget thing. "Our take is that never is going to be the case," he said. "The bad guys are always looking for ways to go around it and new ways to write viruses."
"There's still more to it than cocooning yourself in apparent safety," Ducklin said.
Anti-virus software vendor Central Command issued an alert late yesterday, warning that the Klez-E worm would activate on March 6, attempting to overwrite files that had particular file extensions. According to Central Command it received infection reports about the Worm/Klez family from more than 97 countries.
