Do you have a lot of MP3 files stored on your laptops and notebooks? If you do, you might want to be careful on docking removable flash drives on them because there is currently a low-risk malware that goes after music files prowling the net.

One, now, couldn't help but wonder as to why the creators of this worm would come up with such program. Senior technology consultant Graham Cluley from security vendor Sophos PLC had this to say, "The authors of this worm are more likely to be teenage mischief makers than the organized criminal gangs we typically see authoring financially-motivated malware these days".

The technology assistant then reminded the public how viruses spread from computer to computer decades ago through floppy disks. Cluley commented that the objective for having the malware spread using flash drives is probably to "bypass e-mail filters and Web gateway filters that block malicious software".

Furthermore, computer software company Symantec Corporation now refers to this malware as W32.Deletemusic. It added that the program copies itself to all drives on a PC, not to mention it creating an autorun file to start itself whenever a user accesses a drive.

W32.Deletemusic affects PC units running on Windows 2000, 95, 98, Me, NT, Server 2003, XP and Vista.

Though at first it seemed that China (including Hong Kong) would topple the US from the top of the spam charts, America has defended its title as king of all spam-relaying nations. China's 20% contribution to the global spam total ended up as being second only to the US's 23.2% output. South Korea got third place with 7.5%.

The figures -- covering the months of April to June 2006 -- from IT security firm Sophos reveal that this is the first time in over two years that the US has failed to cut down on all of its spam. The US accounted for half of all spam sent in the world two years ago. China and South Korea, on the other hand, have managed to reduce their spam output since the first quarter of the year.

In the continental category, Asia was the king of the hill with 40.2%, but Europe seems to be trying to usurp the throne in the near future. Europe collectively accounted for 25% of the world's spam in the first quarter of 2006, a figure that has now increased to 27.1%, overtaking North America in the spam spreading league.

There's no sign of Russia in the spam league's top twelve, but Sophos believes that Russian spammers may be lurking just around the corner, controlling "vast networks" of 'zombie' PCs -- computers hijacked by Trojan horses, worms, and viruses controlled by devilish hackers. These zombie PCs are the source of the vast majority of spam tracked by Sophos.