According to anti-virus specialists McAfee AVERT, a division of Network Associates, the virus will likely appear in an e-mail with the subject “Here you have, ;o)” and the body of the e-mail will say “Hi: Check This!” The Visual Basic Script attachment is a file called “AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs”. Recipients should immediately delete the e-mail without opening the attachment.
Network Associates said the worm has already infected numerous large companies and threatens to bring office systems to a standstill by generating an enormous volume of e-mail, although the virus is not thought to harm files on computers.
The spread of the virus, which is thought to have originated in Europe, was today said to be comparatively slow due to protections introduced in many systems following the devastation cause by the Love Bug virus which was launched in May 2000.