World Wide Watch

Electronics Times, Feb 5, 2001

E-mail is such an integral part of the business process that losing it is a nightmare.

Recent attacks of spam mail at two providers in the UK, Pipex [www.dial.pipex.com] and Plusnet [www.plusnet.co.uk], last month meant having to hand-sort millions of e-mails.

But the first month of 2001 has shown the virus continues to be the main threat to e-mail and the business process. A new version of the Melissa virus is currently doing the rounds.

According to Symantec's AntiVirus Research Centre (SARC) [www.sarc.com], more than half of the viruses and worms that attack machines based on the Windows operating system appeared last year for the first time. Coupled with an increase in complexity of two to three times, SARC estimates it now takes anything from two to six hours to write a detection and repair vaccine for a derivative of a virus, and anywhere up to a week for a new, complex threat.

The most common in Europe last year was the JS.Seeker [www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/js.seeker.html], a relatively harmless trojan horse program that alters the default start-up and search pages of your Web browser.

In the US and Japan, the virus of choice was W95.Hybris.gen [www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w95.hybris.gen.html], a more subtle worm that watches the data stream for an e-mail address, then sends itself to that address.

But the largest global threat according to SecurityPortal at [securityportal.com/research/virus/virustop20] is Navidad, [www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.navidad.html]. Almost any trip through the newsgroups throws up the navidad.exe file, which is Spanish for Christmas, and wreaks havoc on your disk drive. But you have to download and run the file in the first place.

The European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research [www.eicar.org] holds its second annual `anti malware' conference in Munich next month to look at viruses in the wild. It will also be looking at the risks of viruses in new places, such as the Palm operating system, which are starting to appear, as well as Linux systems, Windows CE and maybe even the Epoc operating system in mobile phones. But my favourite is the discount hoax virus that circulates as a text e-mail:

"This computer has just been infected by the discount virus. Due to budgetary constraints we have had to let our programming staff go and we are counting on you to use the honour system. Please erase all the files from your hard drive and send this message to the first 50 people on your mailing list!"

If that's the only virus you see this year, you will be very fortunate, and very careful. As Andy Grove of Intel says: only the paranoid survive. That is even more true of the e-mail world.

Bookmarked by nick.flaherty@dial.pipex.com

Copyright: United Business Media Ltd.