Over the last week, “Blackworm” infected more then 700,000 systems as measured using a counter web site used by the worm to track itself. This worm is different and more serious than other worms for a number of reasons. In particular, it will overwrite a user’s files on February 3rd.

At this point, the worm will be detected by up to date anti virus signatures. In order to protect yourself from data loss on February 3rd, you should use current (Jan 23rd or later) anti-virus signatures.

The following file types will be overwritten by the virus: DOC, XLS, MDE, MDB, PPT, PPS, RAR, PDF, PSD, DMP, ZIP. The files are overwritten with an error message( ‘DATA Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 K5]’).

Go to the Internet Storm Center website to read more about Blackworm: http://isc.sans.org/blackworm