According to hundreds of reports posted in the past 48 hours on Russian forums and blogs, there's a new computer worm currently spreading and infecting users on ICQ.

It seems that the outbreak started sometime yesterday and manifests itself as a message received from a friend followed by a file transfer request for an 916.5 KB executable called snatch.exe.

The rogue messages seem to vary, with "Look ))", "No, look )))", "well, a mini game-type )" or " hello!" being just a few examples ("глянь ))", "нет, глянь )))", "ну мини игра типа )", "привет!" in Russian).

The threat seems to be of Russian origin, which is not unusual since ICQ is the most popular instant messaging (IM) application in the country.

Back in April, ICQ was bought by a Russian company called Digital Sky Technologies, from AOL for $187.5 million.

According to a report on the VirusInfo forum (in Russian), the new worm is detected as IM-Worm.Win32.QiMiral.ax by Russian antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab.

Once executed the malware takes control over the instant messaging application and sends copies of itself to everyone in the account's contact list.

Apparently the worm can be cleaned with the latest version of the free Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool, which can be downloaded from here.

IM malware is not as common as it used to be a few years back, but there are still outbreaks targeting users of popular applications from time to time.

Back in May a new version of the Palevo worm spread rapidly across Yahoo! Messenger and Skype making tens of thousands of victims.

According to a recent report from FireEye, based on data gathered in the previous quarter, Palevo is the most prevalent malware on the Internet at the moment.

Users are advised to exercise extreme caution when receiving files via instant messaging applications, even if they appear to originate from trusted people. Running an up-to-date and capable antivirus program at all times is also a must.