‘W32/Perrun’ a photo file virus discovered

SAN FRANCISCO: Security researchers have found the first computer virus able

to corrupt digital images, including photos, stored on a hard-drive in the

popular ".jpg" format, an anti-virus company said on Thursday.

The virus, dubbed "W32/Perrun," can corrupt .jpg files but is

considered low risk because it has not spread, and was not expected to spread,

across the Internet, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of Network Associates

Inc.'s Anti-Virus Response Team.

Even so the Perrun virus was significant because it gave researchers an idea

of a new way that computers can be infected, he said. The virus infects .jpg

files on a machine but does no real harm, Gullotto said.

"It's not serious, but the nature of what the virus writer has done has

us thinking there will be other attempts to do something that is more

complicated or that may have the ability to spread in files that are not

standard .exe files, which are the ones that typically get infected,"

Gullotto said.

Unlike most viruses these days, which automatically distribute themselves via

e-mail systems, this one could arrive in an infected floppy disk, CD, or e-mail,

but it does not have the capability to hop from one computer to another, he

said.

Also on Thursday, Helsinki-based anti-virus company F-Secure warned of a new

worm that appears to be spreading through e-mail, although it too was considered

low risk. The danger with the so-called Frethem worm, a self-replicating virus,

is that it can infect a computer if a user opens the e-mail that contains it.

The worm does not require that the attachment itself be opened, said Tony

Magallanez, a systems engineer for F-Secure in San Jose, California. The worm

sends copies of itself to recipients in the Windows Address Book in Microsoft

Outlook or to e-mail addresses listed in databases on an infected system, he

said.

Updated anti-virus software will protect computer users, Magallanez said. The

worm started to spread on Tuesday and already there have been seven different

variants discovered, he said.

(C)Reuters Limited.