A computer worm spread by e-mail clogged China's Internet traffic Monday by sending thousands of junk messages through the country's network as many people finally returned to work following the Spring Festival and turned on their computers.

The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, China's state-level antivirus authority, said it didn't have detailed figures Monday of how many people were affected by "MyDoom" or how much money was lost.

But "the number is increasing rapidly every hour compared with last week," said an official at the center who declined to be named.

The center said it will release numbers Wednesday.

Last Friday, the center said it had received several hundred phone and e-mail reports about the worm.

Kingsoft Corp, a leading Chinese software provider, said its antivirus system has intercepted more than 240,000 junk e-mails with the worm on Sunday. The situation could become more serious because "many office computers are going to be turned on this week" after the holiday, said Chen Feizhou, general manager of the Beijing-based company's information security department.

Beijing Rising Technology Co Ltd, a domestic computer security firm, said it stopped more than 4,000 messages with the worm Monday, four times as many as last weekend.

The virus spreads on the Internet by attaching itself to e-mail error messages, many of which contain the subject line "test." The text of the worm reads: "The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment."

The message really contains a 30-kilobyte file that, when launched on computers running Microsoft's Windows operating systems, can send out 100 infected e-mail messages in 30 seconds to addresses stored in the computer's address book and other documents.

Kingsoft reported that it has just found a more dangerous variant of the worm that mimics a delivery failure message, the type of message that is often seen in e-mail boxes.

"That makes people more apt to open affected files, because people want to know which e-mails have not been sent," said Chen.

The worm will clog Internet traffic and greatly eat up resources on infected computers to slow down their speeds. Experts also warned that it will leave an open door on the affected computers, allowing hackers to control them remotely in the future.

Chen warned people not to open attached files with the extensions names ".exe," ".scr," ".cmd," ".pif" and ".zip" or those from unknown senders.

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