Another Christmas Virus — Be on the lookout for this. The picture (shown above) is kind of the end result. I had it extracted from the message, so it’s clean. But if you see this after opening some email, then you’ve been had.

PandaLabs reports the appearance of a new Trojan, MerryX.A, which uses the theme of Christmas to distract users’ attention while infecting their computers. This Trojan, distributed in email messages, aims mainly at gathering information from the affected system.

Infection starts with arrival of an email with the subject “MERRY CHRISTMAS!”, and the text line: “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!”. This email includes two attached files: an animated GIF image called A_LIGHTSMC10.GIF, which shows the phrase “Merry Christmas” among bright lights, and a self-extracting RAR file which contains two files: a copy of the Trojan (called SQLServer.exe), and a Flash animation.

Whereas the GIF image does not infect the user’s computer, the self-extracting RAR file does trigger the infection process.