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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (18526)	3/27/1999 12:19:00 PM
From: Moonray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

E-mail virus disrupts many U.S. businesses San Jose Mercury News - Published Saturday, March 27, 1999 Electronic mail traffic was disrupted at businesses throughout the country Friday as mail systems were overloaded by a computer virus, dubbed Melissa by its creator, that spreads itself at lightning speed. The extent of the disruptions is unclear, but companies ranging from Microsoft Corp. to Intel Corp. said they had been infected. Employees at major banks and several smaller companies said they had been affected and in some cases had their mail systems shut down during parts of the day. Although it spreads rapidly, overloading e-mail networks, the virus is not known to cause serious harm, such as deleting files or scrambling information on hard disks. By the end of the day, all major makers of anti-virus software had tools to squash the virus available on their Web sites. ''We believe that there are tens of thousands of people being infected already,'' said Sal Viveros, a marketing manager at security software maker Network Associates Inc. ''It is one of the fastest-spreading viruses that we have seen.'' Viveros said the company had received more than 100 notices from customers saying they had been infected. Home e-mail users could be infected and may receive a flood of unexpected messages that could overload their Internet service provider's system. The virus is transmitted through Microsoft Word 97 attachments to e-mail messages. Once a user activates the virus by opening the attachment, the virus culls up to 50 names from the user's electronic address book and sends itself automatically to those other users. ''We have been instructed not to open it or delete it,'' said Robert Manetta, a spokesman for Intel, who said the company had been infected. Microsoft was infected with the virus early Friday and moved quickly to keep the infection under control internally, according to Adam Sohn, a company spokesman. But Microsoft put a halt on all its outgoing mail for most of the day to ensure the virus didn't spread further, Sohn said. Security software maker Symantec Corp. said it had received notices from about 15 major customers about the virus. About half of those decided to shut down their mail systems before the virus spread, said Enrique Salem, vice president of Symantec's security and assistance business unit. ''We are all so dependent on e-mail that no corporation wants to have their e-mails shut down,'' Salem said. The virus typically arrives in an email headed: ''Important Message From .'' The text of the email reads ''Here is a document you asked for. . . don't show to anyone else ;-)'' Once a user opens it, the attachment contains a list of pornographic Web sites. By then, damage is done, and the e-mail will have replicated itself to up to 50 other users. The virus has one additional side effect: If a user downloads the virus when the minute reading of the current time matches the date of the month -- for example, at 8:26 p.m. on March 26 -- the virus inserts in the user's document the following quote from cartoon character Bart Simpson: ''Twenty-two points, plus triple-word-score, plus fifty points for using all my letters. Game's over. I'm outta here.'' Users can avoid spreading the virus by simply refusing to open the e-mail attachment. o~~~ O