Gnutella is a peer-to-peer file sharing network similar in some ways to Napster. Designed to be de-centralized, Gnutella advocates praise its ability to maintain privacy and weather a nuclear storm. In premise, it's a means to share files with complete strangers, avoiding copyright, government, and advertising infringements. In reality, the total anonymity just might evolve into a great way to get infected.

A worm/Trojan that renames itself to whatever the user is searching for has recently been discovered infecting the Gnutella network. Thus, if a user were searching for cranberries, and that request were received by an infected user's machine, Gnuman would rename itself to "cranberries.exe". This file would then be dished up to the unsuspecting searcher. Due to Gnutella's structure, it would be impossible to determine which machine sent the infected file. Dyan Dyer, CEO of Command Software Systems, offered one tip to readily identify Gnuman, "the potentially infected files can be identified by their size, which will always be 8192KB."

Depending on the antivirus vendor, Gnuman might be referred to as: W95/Gnuman.AGnutellaMandragore, Mandragore, Troj_Mandragore, W32/Gnuman.worm, or W32/GnutellaMan.

This is not the first worm to target the Gnutella network. In June 2000, a VBScript worm dubbed GWV used a bit of social engineering in an attempt to spread. GWV created copies of itself in the Gnutella directory, using compelling (and likely searched) names such as: "Jenna Jameson movie listing.vbs", "Pamela Anderson movie listing.vbs", "Asia Carerra movie listing.vbs", "xxx FTP movie listing.vbs", "ASF Compressor (No quality loss).vbs", "collegesex.vbs", "Gladiator.vbs", "Battlefield Earth.vbs", "Evangelion complete episodes scripts.vbs", "Scan Master checklist.vbs", "How to eat p****.vbs", "Alicia Silverstone.vbs", "Pearl Jam.vbs", "Mp3 compressor (Half the size but same quality).vbs", "Napster Metallica Crack.vbs", "Santana.vbs", "NSync.vbs", "Nirvana.mp3.vbs", "Shania Twain.mp3.vbs", "Jesus loves you.vbs", "Gnutella upgrade.vbs", and "OFFICIAL Gnutella Option Pack.vbs".

Both of these worms affect Windows operating system users only.