The much hyped and dreaded Kamasutra virus was ranked third among the top viruses that went about attacking and infecting PCs on Friday, said security experts who are busy analysing and evaluating email virus threats on the Internet. The worm has an interesting feature. When it infects a computer it opens a Web browser on a certain webpage. This increments the counter on that webpage.

Experts said they were contacted by the organisation that runs the site with that counter who informed them that the counter readings were not accurate. There were multiple hits from the same IPs to the counter. According to the latest information, the number of hits from unique IPs is over 300,000.

The Municipality of Milan, Italy, had many of their 10,000 machines infected by Nyxem.E and have chosen to switch off their network on Friday. The vast majority of the machines infected by Kamasutra are home computers and experts predict that nothing will happen on them until people get home from work and boot up their machines. Experts suggest the full scope of the problem won’t come to light until during the weekend or early next week.

Nyxem.E is written in Visual Basic and is compiled as p-code. The size of the main executable is about 95 kilobytes. When the worm’s file is run, it first opens WinZip as a decoy.
Some offices in Mumbai reported denial of service attacks coupled with Internet services crashing.

"We were hit by the Kamasutra virus. The Internet keeps crashing every five minutes," said an administrator. Experts had suggested that the Kamasutra virus was not high on the threat scale and was categorised as a mass mailing worm.What is known, say experts, is that the worm sends itself as attachment in the infected email. The email subject can be one the following, the Best Videoclip Ever, School girl fantasies gone bad, a great video, Kama Sutra pics, Arab sex DSC-00465.jpg, give me a kiss, *Hot Movie*, Fw: Funny ), Fwd: Photo, Fwd: image.jpg, Fw: Sexy, Re:, Fw:, Fw: Picturs, Fw: DSC-00465.jpg, Word file, eBook.pdf, the file, Part 1 of 6 Video clipe, You Must View This Videoclip!, Miss Lebanon 2006, Re: Sex Video and My photos.

The message body may be one of the following, Note: forwarded message attached, Hot XXX Yahoo Groups, F****n Kama Sutra pics, ready to be F**** ),forwarded message attached, VIDEOS! FREE! (US$ 0,00), Please see the file>> forwarded message, ——- forwarded message — i just any one see my photos. It’s Free ), how are you? i send the details., OK?

Internet retailing giant Amazon.com Inc. disappointed investors with a fourth quarter earnings report that missed Wall Street’s revenue expectations and showed the company continues to make heavy investments in areas such as technology and marketing.

The results, released after the markets closed on Thursday, sent shares tumbling more than 8 percent, in after-hours trading. Amazon.com shares had fallen $1.24, or 2.8 per cent, to close at $42.74 in regular trading Thursday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

"Investing in their business in order to put in place an infrastructure of the Amazon of tomorrow is becoming, increasingly, an expensive proposition," said analyst David Garrity with Investec. "And it becomes painful, if you will, for investors to wait for that to happen." For the three months ended December 31, Amazon.com said it earned $199 million, or 47 cents per share, compared with $347 million, or 82 cents per share in the last three months of 2004. The Seattle-based company said the most recent results included a one-time tax benefit of $38 million. In the last three months of 2004, Amazon.com said it recorded a $239 million one-time tax gain.