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THE Bagle.B Internet worm continued to propagate itself throughout the world, with experts ranking the virus as the third most dangerous computer bug after the notorious Sobig.F and Mydoom.A.

"This is a very serious worm, it's spread itself quite rapidly, but it will probably not reach the same catastrophic proportions as Mydoom.A and Sobig.F," Snorre Fagerland, with Norwegian Internet security company Norman said.

"On the scale of the most dangerous viruses, it gets a third place," he added.

According to US-based e-mail security firm MessageLabs, Bagle.B had been found in 66 countries by early Wednesday and reached an infection rate of one in every 16 e-mails.

Most affected were the US, were 16 percent of the infected e-mails were found, closely followed by the UK with 14 percent and Germany with 10 percent, it said.

While Bagle.B continued to proliferate on Wednesday experts estimated that the outbreak would fizzle out soon, well before the bug's programmed expiration date of February 25.

"It's still spreading fairly rapidly, it's a big case, but the technical features of the virus are not that special," Mikael Albrecht, of the Finnish Internet Security F-Secure informed. "As soon as most people have updated their anti-virus protection, it will die out," he noted.

The Bagle.B was initially spread from Poland and Germany on Tuesday afternoon, and propagated itself throughout Europe and Americas overnight, but Asia seemed to have largely escaped the outbreak, experts noted.

The first variant of the Bagle bug was found on January 18, and both bugs are believed to be linked to spammers -- senders of unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements -- as they retrieve e-mail addresses from the infected computers.