Klez update: Virus as fix

The past week did not see any activity by the virus creators but it certainly

did see the law taking action against them. David Smith, author of the infamous

Melissa virus, was finally tried and punished for the havoc he unleashed on the

email systems of global corporations the world over. In March 1999, companies

such as Microsoft, Intel and Lucent were forced to shut their email systems down

because of the large amount of email generated by Melissa. The virus also forced

the closure of government email systems both in the US and the UK. Melissa is a

macro virus which replicates under Microsoft Word (Office 97 & 2000 ). It

infects Word documents and templates and sends copies out through Microsoft

Outlook. It sends messages to addresses retrieved from the local address book

and thus is able to spread itself as far & wide as possible. Of course, an

unfortunate side effect is that your personal documents could end up all over

the Internet.

The virus also has a variant in the form of an Internet worm called Melissa.b.

This is relatively harmless since it merely sends an email to a single user from

your address book warning him about the Melissa virus and providing a list of

sites with information how to protect oneself from the virus. Now, who said

virus writers don't have a heart?

In another case, the author of Anna Kournikova virus has appealed against a

sentence of 150 hours of community service for spreading the virus. This

Internet worm used the Visual Basic scripting language to launch itself when

email recipients were fooled into believing they had received an image of the

Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova.

The latest on the Klez virus is that a fake email is doing the rounds

claiming to contain a fix for the virus. This email appears to have been sent

from a famous anti-virus software company. In reality it downloads and runs a

program that gives the author access to your computer. The email has a subject

with the sentence "You're under serious threat!" and exploits a

vulnerability in Internet Explorer to launch itself.

Well, we can always hope that the threat of legal action and punishment will

act as a deterrent to potential virus writers but prevention being generally

better than the cure, it's safer to rely on the latest updated antivirus

software to protect yourself. Check out www.mwti.net

for more on how you can do this.