The third Linux virus in almost as many months has hit the Internet, looking for so-called 'back doors' in the security of Linux systems.
Known as the Adore worm, the program is designed to send information identifying the compromised systems to four different email addresses hosted on servers in China and the United States.
"It seems to be a variant of the Ramen worm," said David Dittrich, security administrator for the University of Washington and an expert on digital forensics and hacking tools.
The Ramen worm, which used three well-known security flaws to infect systems using the Red Hat distribution of Linux, hit in mid-January and infected an unknown number of computers.
The 1i0n worm, discovered last month by the Systems Administration Networking and Security Institute (SANS), used a fourth flaw to spread among servers that had domain name service, or DNS, software installed.
The worm appears to be spreading quickly and hammering a variety of servers with scans aimed at uncovering telltale signs of the vulnerable programs.
After infecting a machine and sending information about the computer through email, the worm waits until 4:02 a.m. and then deletes all its files, except the backdoor.
