So what's up with all these virus/trojans/spyware?

If you haven't updated your antivirus, please do. The Blackworm (aliased as Nyxem, Blackmal, CME-24, etc) annoyance starts tomorrow, Feb 3rd. Make sure those virus definitions are up to date..

This one will spread to any mounted drive (aka, a drive that has an assigned drive letter, so a network drive, a USB drive, etc)

It also searches for email address and mass mails itself out to others...

But the real payload is, on the 3rd of each month, it sees fit to overwrite files with doc, xls, modify, mde, ppt, pps, zip, rar, pdf, psd and dmp extension. Not just deletes them, but overwrites them (read: not recoverable by typical means.) At the same time, it tries to terminate certain running processes (read: potentially disables antivirus, firewall, antispyware, etc.)

It's a buggar......

For more info:
AVG/Grisoft
F-Secure
NAI/McAfee

Again, it seems that each likes to have it's own name for these things which makes it really a pain in the ass to determine if your protected or not.

Regardless, make sure all your protections are up to date.