Polyglot worm spreads via IM

A curious little worm has been spotted spreading via various IM applications – Skype, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, and others.

What is curious about it is that it has the ability to detect the user’s location and offer the message in the appropriate language. It is able to use almost 20 languages, and if it doesn’t recognize the country where the user is situated, it uses the message in English (seen this? 😀 followed by the malicious link).

But, according to Symantec‘s researchers, this is not its only tactic for spreading – it uses removable drives to do it, too. Once the computer is infected, the worm attempts to infect all removable drives present, and does so every five minutes. It then hides any other folder that may be on the drive and replaces them with a single shortcut to the worm. The icon used for the shortcut is that of a folder, in order to fool careless users.