IYAAAA! It’s going to eat you lovingly cared for music library!

It’s no secret that people like to collect music on their PCs, with music files taking up more and more hard drive space as time goes on. Recent data from Comscore says that as of April of this year the typical computer in the US contains an average of 880 MP3 files, taking up roughly 3GB of hard drive space. Compared to the average number of Word documents (197), PDFs (100), and Excel files (77), music files make up the single most common type of file found on an average computer by a long shot.

But that very hobby could bite an avid MP3 collector in the butt if a new worm makes its way into their computers. A newly-uncovered worm called W32.Deletemusic does exactly what its name implies—it goes through a PC and deletes all MP3 files in sight. And that’s it. Simultaneously low-threat and highly annoying, the worm makes its way from computer to computer by spreading itself onto all attached drives of a given PC, including flash drives and removable media. If that media is then removed and inserted into another computer, it continues its music-eating rampage on the new host.

Source.

EEK! Mari would just die if her entire .mp3 collection was eaten by this trojan. Mari spent hours ripping her stuff from her CDs. Then again, Mari’s library may be mostly in .aac format now that Mari uses iTunes. Wonder if it eats those too…

Watch out, everybody! Keep your antivirus running (assuming that you’re on Windows like Mari).