The Fizzer worm may be forced to turn on itself after a loose-knit community of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) users gained control of the web page from which the worm automatically updates itself.

The IRC community has been the hardest hit by the worm, which uses malicious bots to connect to IRC networks from infected hosts.

Calling themselves the Fizzer Task Force, a group of IRC network users determined to destroy the worm accessed the Geocities hosted web page which Fizzer uses.

Once it had access to the page, the group posted a 'Fizzer cleaner' to the URL where the worm downloads its updates as a self extracting and running executable, which causes Fizzer to remove all of its registry keys.

"We're crossing our fingers that the bots are looking for an executable to update themselves," said the group.

But if the sabotage attempt fails, the Fizzer Task Force warned that attacks would be far from over because shutting down malicious bots manually isn't enough, as the infected computer will generate a replacement.