From Dark Reading

Aggressive new variant of an older worm circulating around Yahoo Messenger lets attacker take over a victim's machine

A smiley-faced instant message with a photo link posing as if it's from someone on your buddy list is actually spreading misery worldwide in the form of a worm on Yahoo Instant Messenger: The IM ultimately delivers a worm that allows an attacker to take over the victim's machine, not to mention spread itself among the victim's contact list.

Researchers at BitDefender, BKIS, and Symantec today each separately warned Yahoo Messenger users about the worm attack, which is rapidly growing. Catalin Coisoi, senior malware and virus researcher for BitDefender, based in Romania, says his team has seen infection rates as high as 500 percent per hour in his home country since they first spotted it last week. "Today it started spreading like wildfire," Coisoi says.

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