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After a barrage of infestations some security analysts say equaled the magnitude of the Melissa virus that struck two years ago, an e-mail worm masquerading as an image of tennis player Anna Kournikova appears to be slowing today.

"We have received less calls today than yesterday," says Mikko Hyppsnen, manager of antivirus research at F-Secure. Worldwide, Hyppsnen estimates, several thousand computers were affected among users of F-Secure's antivirus software, although he says the company would have a better handle on that later this week.

The AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs worm first began replicating itself throughout e-mail systems in the United States on Monday. The Visual Basic Script worm takes advantage of Microsoft's Outlook e-mail software. It comes as an attachment embedded in a message with a subject line reading "Here you have, ;o)" and a message that says "Hi: Check This!."

United States Takes Brunt

Hyppsnen says the United States felt the worm's greatest impact. By the time users in Asia and Europe woke up this morning, he adds, ample warnings had been highly publicized and antivirus vendors such as F-Secure had updated their software packages to detect the worm and block it from infecting e-mail systems.

That appears to have helped slow the spread of the worm, which--like last year's "I Love You" virus and Melissa before it--attacks Outlook clients and then replicates itself to all the users in an individual's e-mail address book. However, last summer Microsoft offered an Outlook security patch, and PC users who downloaded that patch should be protected.

Other than overly full mailboxes, the worm doesn't appear to cause any harmful effects to the PCs it infects, according to an advisory issued by the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "However, historical data has shown that the intruder community can quickly modify the code for more destructive behavior," CERT warns.

(For more information about viruses, see PCWorld.com's "Viruses 2000: A Special Report.")

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