W32.Mypics.Worm

W32.Mypics.Worm was discovered on the evening of Dec 2, 1999. The worm propagates automatically on Windows 9x and Windows NT platforms through email and has a destructive payload that triggers in the year 2000. The worm propagates by automatically sending itself to as many as 50 people in the Outlook address book. The subject line is empty and the body of the email is:

Here's some pictures for you!

It will also contain a worm program attachment named pics4you.exe (34,304 bytes).
Below is an example of how the email message will appear:



It attempts to fool the recipient into believing that the attachment contains images. When the attachment is executed (pics4you.exe), the program does not display any images and simply seems to have terminated. But the worm will become resident in memory and will email itself to as many as 50 people. The worm will also modify the current Microsoft Internet Explorer browser's 'Home Page' setting to an adult web page. The Windows registry keys will also be modified and changed to load the worm in memory every time the computer system is rebooted. As a result, the worm will always be resident in memory.

The worm has two payloads that simulate a Y2K problem. First, the worm monitors the system clock and when it detects the year is 2000, the worms will modify the system BIOS. On the next cold reboot, the computer will display a message such as "CMOS Checksum Invalid" and prevent the computer from booting. This can easily be corrected by going into the BIOS setup.

After the BIOS settings are corrected, the worm will execute its second payload and will format the hard drive.