MessageLabs claims to have intercepted around 70,000 instances of the as yet unnamed Bagle variant during a three hour period on 31 May, with 45,000 being intercepted between 15:00 (BST) and 16:00 (BST). Other vendors are yet to recognise its spread, suggesting caution rather than panic is the order of the day.
According to MessageLabs the virus appears to have originated from a Yahoo! group.
The e-mail appears to offer little by way of social engineering with a blank subject line and no body text judging by those intercepted so far by the UK e-mail security firm.
The Bagle downloader variant drops a Trojan which will attempt to download Bagle from a long list of locations. It also has a self-propagating element bundled into a zipped attachment. When activated it will harvest e-mail addresses and send itself on to all contacts on an infected user's machine.
Also a new variant of Mytob has been spotted in the wild.
According to Blackspider, Mytob has been seen in slightly smaller numbers but is yet another infection for users to be wary of. Many of the subject lines used by the 60KB e-mail refer to imminent closure of the user's e-mail account. It also carries a zipped attachment.
Silicon.com's Will Sturgeon reported from London. For more coverage from Silicon.com, click here.
Yet more maintenance that has to be performed on MS based boxen. If I didn't make money from it, I'd whinge. But since I do, all I have to say is: THANK YOU BILL GATES!