Quote:
Originally posted by basa
If it cannot send itself it basically crashes, which is why you see your PC restart. By this time though it has probably sent itself many times.
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Sort of true. The worm contains the exploit code for both Win2K systems and WinXP systems - the two exploits are different. The worm (being incredibly badly written) has no way of working out whether the system it is running on is Win2K or WinXP and so runs one of the exploit codes randomly (I gather it's 60% XP code and 40% 2K code). If it runs the wrong code for your version of Windows, this causes a crash that results in the shutdown.
The worry is that a new variant of the worm will get written that does check the version of Windows you're running and so only run the correct exploit. This way you won't get the shutdowns - and so won't be aware you've got it...