A new worm emerging from Australia has put antivirus companies and IT managers on red alert.

'Mylife' is a mass-mailing virus with a destructive payload that sends itself to everyone in the recipient's Windows address book. It was first seen last month but began to spread in earnest on 1 April.

"This worm usually arrives as an email attachment named 'My Life.scr'," warned antivirus experts F-Secure.

"When a user clicks on the attachment the worm is activated. It shows a picture [of a little girl covering her mouth with a rose], installs itself [into Windows System folder] as My Life.scr and adds its startup key to the Registry."

The details of the e-mail are:

From: (recipient)
Subject: The List
Message Body: Hiiiii
How are youuuuuuuu?
Here is that Notepad you asked for ... don't show anyone else ;-)
Notepad = list
list = 137
buyyyy

The worm mails with the following message:

From: (name of infected user)
To: (random name from address book)
Subject: my life ohhhhhhhhhhhhh
Hiiiii
How are youuuuuuuu?
look to the digital picture it's my love
vvery verrrry ffffunny :-)
my life = my car
my car = my house
Attachment: My Life.scr

Once activated, the virus displays a bogus 'Error' notice to disguise its activities. The destructive payload will then attempt to format the D, E, F, G, H and I drives.

Between the 50th and 59th minute of the hour the virus attempts to delete all folders on the C drive while displaying the message:

Lo0o0oL
My Life.C

Antivirus company McAfee advised: "The only way to stamp out the epidemic of viruses is to install technology, processes and a mindset that enable us to prevent these annoyances doing any damage.

"Everyone has a duty in limiting the effect viruses have, whether it be the installation of antivirus software, the updating of patches or, just as importantly, vigilance in the opening of emails.

"As always, we advise users not to open random attachments from random people unless they are very sure of their content."