But the worm, which goes by more than a dozen different names, highlights the need once again for the industry to come to some sort of a consensus for identifying viruses in a standard fashion, they added.

The Blackmal threat, also known as Nyxem.E, Grew A., Kapser, Mywife and Kama Sutra, spreads via e-mail attachments or file shares.

According to a description of the worm on the SANS Institute Web site, once the worm infects a system on a network via e-mail, it tries to infect all shared file systems it has access to. The worm also attempts to disable and delete most antivirus products on the machine and then e-mails itself to others using a variety of file names and extensions, said Bethesda, Md.-based SANS.

The worm's payload is triggered to go off on the third of every month, when it deletes information from common file formats on the infected system.

"The worm regularly checks the system time. When the system data is the third of the month, 30 minutes after the victim machine is booted, Nyxem will delete information from common file formats, replacing data with a meaningless set of symbols," according to an advisory from Kaspersky Labs.