Executives at the American Muslim Council are mad as hell.

Last Friday, on the Muslim Sabbath and on the cusp of the holy month of Ramadan, the council's e-mail list was infected with the malicious "Snow White" virus. The council, in a press release, described the infection as a "criminal invasion" by "hackers" in "a deliberate attempt to discredit and to disable e-mail communications to our members." Virus experts, on the other hand, are pretty sure the whole thing's a big mistake. Snow White, known to virus fighters as "W32/Hybris.gen@MM," has been infuriating the online world since October 2000. At its peak in January 2001, hybrid strains accounted for more than 20 percent of the complaints reported to anti-virus company Sophos. The virus, according to researchers with Network Associates, usually comes as an e-mail message from hahaha@sexyfun.net, with the subject "Snowhite and the Seven Dwarfs - The REAL story!" There's an attachment --­ usually sexy virgin.scr, joke.exe, midgets.scr or dwarf4you.exe --­ that, when opened, infects the WSOCK32.DLL file, a key component of Windows that's used whenever a computer connects to the Internet. The modified file keeps tabs on all of the e-mail addresses communicating with the infected computer, and then sends a copy of the worm to those addresses. As it operates, the worm accesses a newsgroup like alt.comp.virus to update itself. The most common of these virus plug-ins is a spiral graphic that can't be closed or stopped once it appears on the victim's desktop. At this point, most anti-virus programs have long found vaccines for the infection.