‘Sasser’ Worm Disrupts PCs Worldwide

A pesky computer worm snarled hundreds of thousands of machines worldwide in the latest virus-like outbreak to take advantage of a known flaw with the Windows operating system.

Because the new worm, dubbed “Sasser,” does not require users to click on an e-mail attachment to activate, it spreads more rapidly than most viruses. It was discovered late Friday and spread as employees returned to work and booted up their machines.

The worm caused some computers to continually crash and reboot, apparently the result of bad programming by the virus writer rather than intent, security experts said.