The Mytob worms have made a significant impact on the virus outbreak charts this year, so anything which may prevent future variants from being developed and released must be welcomed.

Unlike worms, it doesn't have a capability to replicate itself and so has to be manually spread by being spammed out deliberately, or people downloading it from a Web site.

However, when examined by an experienced virus analyst the similarities become clear. It appears that whoever wrote Zotob had access to the Mytob source code, ripped out the email-spreading section, and plugged in the Microsoft exploit.

It opened up a can of worms. I think the league wants to prevent something like this from happening again.

There are a tiny number of mobile-phone viruses compared to the threat on the Windows platform.

You need to decide yourself on this one. The vulnerability is a serious problem -- we've seen over 200 different exploits -- but I don't think this is a time to panic.