Malware posing as cute holiday greetings sent by email is as old as the concept of email itself. And yet today, Halloween 2007, <A HREF="http://www.cio.com/article/150551/The_Storm_Worm_Dresses_Up_as_a_Dancing_Skeleton">a Storm Worm variant is spreading</A> under the auspices of an animated Halloween greeting card that features skeletons cutting a rug to the Venga Boys' "Boom Boom Boom." According to several vendors announcing the new scam, emails arrive with subject lines including: Happy Halloween; Dancing Bones; The most amazing dancing skeleton; Show this to the kids; Send this to your friends; Man this rocks.

By downloading the Janglin' Bones Show, users will be mildly amused, or simply distracted, for approximately eleven seconds. During this time, their PCs will be infected with a variant of the Storm Worm, a persistent and resilient bot that allows remote control of the PC and has been used largely to mass-distribute spam. In fact, it's likely that Storm was used to distribute the e-mail, which was timed perfectly, according to Graham Cluley, a vice president at Sophos anti-virus.