Since mid-January, the Happy99.exe worm has been making its rounds of the Internet, infecting PCs and sending thousands of unsolicited messages without the victim's knowledge.

After originated among Usenet users in Europe, Finnish data security firm Data Fellows Inc. says the worm now has made landfall in the United States and is wreaking havoc among Silicon Valley users.

The worm program does not attempt to destroy files on infected machines, however the e-mails and newsgroup postings it sends can cause network slowdowns or even crash corporate e-mail servers.

The full story appears on ZDNN .