Virus alert: Nyxem set to spring on 3 February

Businesses have been warned to brace themselves for a possible traffic spike next week caused by the Nyxem virus.
Nyxem was first reported on 16 January. It is thought to have infected more than half a million PCs and security vendor Ironport warned on Thursday that these machines are now hard-coded to propagate the virus on 3 February.
Companies are unlikely to be directly affected if they are running up-to-date antivirus software because the major antivirus vendors have now released patches. But Ironport warned companies could experience secondary effects as the virus tries to propagate itself by harvesting email addresses on an infected machine.
Jason Steer, technical consultant at Ironport, said: "The knock-on effects will come as compromised PCs try to communicate with businesses. This will cause additional email and network traffic, and possible slow down email response time."
Security company F-Secure has reported that Nyxem.E reached the top position in its virus statistics with 21.7 per cent of all reported infections. On Saturday the web counter used by the Nyxem worm itself showed more than 510,000 infections and continued to rise, according to F-Secure.