The worm, named Sasser, began to spread on Saturday, and unlike a virus does not travel through e-mails or attachments. It can spread by itself to any unprotected computer linked to the Internet.
It attacks through a flaw in recent versions of Microsoft's Windows -- Windows 2000 (news - web sites), Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP (news - web sites) -- and causes the computer to shut down, then rebooting it, repeating the process several times. But it appears to do no lasting damage.
The anti-virus company Panda Software said Sunday slightly more than three percent of the world's computers, around 18 million out of the estimated 600 million operating worldwide, were infected.
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