Looking more at Plug N' Play worms and Zotob

If you've been following the news about Zotob, IRCBot, Bozori, and the other families of worms to attack the recent Plug-and-Play vulnerability (MS05-039), you know that another worm war has begun between the latter two worm families and Zotob, which so far is not “fighting back” with a new variant that deletes the others.  F-Secure's highly recommended weblog provides this “high-tech illustration” of who's killing who:

Also a good read is vnunet.com's article, W32/IRCBot worm beats Sasser record, which talks a bit about how quickly this worm appeared after its associated vulnerability was released relative to the more widely successful (especially among home users) Sasser worm.

I received an email about this worm's ability to affect Windows XP machines, and the answer to that appears to be that Windows XP machines are not natively able to be infected, but with registry modifications (that are rare but occasionally found) it can be, although I have not been able to specifically verify this.