Frankfurt, Jan. 17 (Reuters): A mass e-mail posing as a plea for aid to help the victims of last month?s Asian tsunami disaster is actually a vehicle for spreading a computer virus, Web security firm Sophos said today.

The worm appears with the subject line: ?Tsunami donation! Please help!? and invites recipients to open an attachment called ?tsunami.exe? ? which, if opened, will forward the virus to other Internet users.

It could also initiate a denial-of-service attack against a German hacking website, Sophos said, in which the site?s server would be bombarded with messages, putting it out of action. Sophos added that it had so far only received a small number of reports of the worm.