Security vendor IronPort warned Thursday that these machines are now hard-coded to propagate the virus on Feb. 3. Companies are unlikely to be directly affected if they are running up-to-date antivirus software, because the major antivirus vendors have now released patches. But IronPort warned that companies could experience secondary effects, as the virus tries to propagate itself by harvesting e-mail addresses on an infected machine. This will cause additional e-mail and network traffic and a possible slowdown in e-mail response time,” said Jason Steer, a technical consultant at IronPort. F-Secure has reported that Nyxem.E reached the top position on Thursday in its virus statistics list, with 21.7 percent of all reported infections.