Emails claiming to contain video clips of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden are likely to be example of a new computer worm.

The Famus-F (http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32famusf.html) worm normally arrives in the form of a bilingual English and Spanish email, with the subject line "More terrorism this year". The message body states: "Last speech from Bin Laden. Please forwards this video to everybody." and includes a password - "cnn".

If executed, the worm attempts to forward itself to email addresses found on infected computers. It also drops a number of files onto the hard drive. Fortunately, Famus-F is not spreading very successfully. Even so, vigilance is advisable.

The worm is yet another example of virus writers using a topical subject to trick users into running malicious code. In July virus writers tried to trick (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/23/hackarmy_trojan) users into opening a Trojan horse on their PC by passing malicious code off as a "suicide photographs" of bin Laden. This wasn't particularly successful, but that didn't stop the repeated use of the ploy in attempts to spread the Hackarmy (http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/trojhackarmya.html) Trojan in the last four months. ®

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