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Its official: Pokemon are viral

The little yellow critter is the cover for the latest email worm

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We've had to deal with Pokemon trading cards, Pokemon games and Pokemon cartoons but it all got a little bit worse with the arrival on the scene of a Pokemon worm.

Another addition to the "Outlook" hall of fame, this little blighter will delete your Windows system files and so on in a very familiar way. Click here for Symantec's summary of the worm.

Clearly targeting the younger emailers, the worm arrives with the email subject "Pikachu Pokemon". The email purports to be from the Pikachu website and contains an attachment file "pikachupokemon.exe" which will only run if the file MSVBVM60.dll is installed and available on the system.

Symantec describes the threat as minimal and says that customers who have updated their virus protection since June 28 will be fine. Outlook express is not affected. ®

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