If your e-mail inbox is clogged with Christmas greetings messages, you should not be fooled into believing they are all messages from well-wishers.

The latest e-mail virus is cleverly disguised as a Christmas greeting, prompting unsuspecting users who open the e-mail attachment to infect their computer with the latest variant of the Zafi worm.

Maltanet commercial services manager Gordon Dimech said that internet users across Europe were worst hit and Malta was no exception. Local servers were flooded with e-mails which affected the normal timely delivery of legitimate mails.

The Zafi virus capitalises on the fact that e-mail users are more than likely to open a message they believe is a Christmas greeting from a friend or acquaintance.

This version also has a clever twist, since it translates "Merry Christmas" into one of 15 languages depending on the final suffix of the recipient's e-mail address. This multilingual ability is helping the malicious virus spread like wildfire. It is estimated that about ten per cent of the e-mail messages currently on the internet are infected with the Zafi virus.

"Internet users certainly can't blame the internet service providers for all the delays experienced," Mr Dimech said.

The virus can also propagate itself through peer-to-peer or file-sharing connections, while it also disables various personal firewall and antivirus applications, Maltanet's systems and networks engineer Karl Stevens, explained.

The Zafi virus also allows hackers to control an infected computer via a "network backdoor" and it replaces normal Windows files on the infected computers, making its removal much more difficult and time consuming.

Anti-virus companies have issued warnings about the new worm and updated anti-virus signatures to stop the threat.

Maltanet customers are protected thanks to the anti-virus e-mail scanning, as infected e-mails were detected and blocked.

"However our e-mail servers were not spared the additional load of infected e-mails as users with other ISPs both locally and overseas tried to send infected e-mails to Maltanet users," Mr Stevens said.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.