14 DAY TRIAL // I must tell you from the beginning, this is not the kind of worm similar to 'OK, I'm infected, let's start the antivirus and remove it!' because this threat attempts to disable the antivirus protection and infect both computers and the connected removable drives. But what's more important is that the threat has a high damage potential and a medium distribution potential which means it can easily infect your computer and really harm your data. As far as I can see from the technical details provided by Trend Micro, the worm affects several security technologies such as the Avast Antivirus so the danger is pretty serious.
"This worm drops copies of itself. It may be downloaded unknowingly by a user when visiting malicious Web site(s). It may also be downloaded from remote site(s) by other malware. It creates registry entries to enable its automatic execution at every system startup. It modifies a registry entry to hide files with both System and Read-only attributes," Trend Micro wrote in the advisory.
"It accesses Web sites to download files. As a result, malicious routines of the downloaded files are exhibited on the affected system. This worm terminates certain processes, if found running in memory."
The threat is pretty new so there are no reports concerning successful infections with WORM_NSANTI.AD. The worm affects most versions of the Microsoft operating system, including Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and Server 2003.
Just like usual, you can keep your computer protected by installing the latest virus definitions for your antivirus as well as the latest patches supposed to correct the bugs and defend your data. In addition, you can always keep an eye on the security advisories concerning the glitches in the installed application to be safe the system is defended and there is no breach that could enable an attacker to invade your information.