A PARTICULARLY NASTY computer virus has been discovered in China and the government there is warning that it could spread fast.
Although details of the Worm_Piloyd.B are fairly sketchy at the moment, it is unusual to get a virus warning from China before the rest of the world has caught it.
Surprisingly there have been no traditional messages of doom from the computer insecurity companies in Europe and the US, which normally are quick to play up the four horsemen of the apocalypse scenario about malware.
The virus infects exe, html and asp files and if the user tries to restore the files they are blocked from doing so. Notification has come from the Tianjin-based National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre.
Worm_Piloyd.B forces the system to download other viruses from websites and is probably a recruiting tool for a botnet.
Experts suggested that computer users should update their antivirus software and use the real-time computer virus monitoring function whenever they surf the world wide web, Xinhua news agency reported.