W32.Gammima.AG is the name of the worm that managed to infect the laptops of the International Space Stations. Designed for Windows XP and earlier, the worm is capable of stealing usernames and password for online game servers and sending them to the attacker, which makes it irrelevant for NASA's computers.

The worm is functioning rather simply, by infiltrating all computer drives and attempting to create an autorun file that allows it to run every time the drive is accessed. A registry key is also created so that the worm can run itself at system startup.

NASA said that this is not the first time a computer virus infected their computers, and that the worm is not critical to the correct operation of the International Space Station, creating more of a nuisance than a real problem. The infected laptops are being used for non-critical tasks, such as e-mail and experiments.

The virus is most likely to have gotten on the laptops through storage drives, since there is no direct Internet connection on the ISS. Since some of the laptops were not equipped with antivirus software, NASA has now installed the latest version of Norton AntiVirus.