Virus Alert: Love Bug = I love you virus:

[Guest guest]

The irony of sending this via email is not lost....

From ZDNET

Love Bug Takes Deadly Toll

By Joe Berkofsky

May 4, 2000

An insidious email-borne virus that chokes networks and devours

music and graphics files has infected many of the world's corporations in

a plague that's spread faster than the infamous, devastating bug.

By midday Thursday the so-called " ILOVEYOU " bug had struck

tens of thousands of multinational corporate and government networks in

Europe, Asia, and North America, and was spreading, as one virus watcher

put it, " like wildfire. "

What makes this email-borne bug so seductive, and potentially

dangerous, is the simple " ILOVEYOU " subject line above the

message, analysts say.

" People are a lot more curious about this than , "

M. , a Brookline, Mass.-based Internet consultant, told ZDTV

News.

The " Love Bug " hit more than 200,000 mail hubs globally,

infecting Britain's House of Commons; Switzerlands' Credit Suisse bank;

the Pentagon; Congress, US military bases; the US Department of

Agriculture; media mega-corp Time Warner; ABC; C-SPAN; ESPN; the Dallas

Morning News; Fox and financial giant Merrill Lynch, Ford Motor Co., plus

several Web firms.

The White House said it was " affected " but that operations

are running " smoothly. " The FBI's National Infrastructure

Protection Center issued a warning and was investigating.

The vicious bug-- only 11kb, but once-unleashed, highly

destructive-- mirrors the 1999 worm. It appears as an unsolicited

..vbs file attached to email carrying the subject line

" ILOVEYOU " and containing the body text, " kindly check the

attached LOVELETTER coming from me. " Computer users who get the bug

should simply delete the email without opening the attachment.

The virus:

· Replaces

MPEG music files with itself;

· Replaces

JPEG graphics files with itself;

· Commandeers

Micosoft's Outlook email program and mails itself to everyone in the

Outlook address book;

· Replaces

any IE5 Web browser start page with a different webpage that contains an

unknown executable file (the files reportedly lived on pages that have

since been removed from a Manila-based ISP, Sky Internet).

Like the " worm " virus, the " Love Bug "

searches a computer for all files with the extensions JPG, JPEG, MP2, and

MP3, as well as other lesser-used files, and replaces them with decoys of

itself under the same name-- this time with the extension VBS.

The Love Bug can worm its way through corporate firewalls because

most are not built to resist attachments with a .txt.vbs extension.

All of the leading antiviral software firms have released free trial

versions of fix programs that will protect a machine from such bugs, but

will not allow you to recover lost files that have not been backed up.

The Love Bug also crawls across chat rooms through the popular mIRC

chat tool. If you've been infected, you will spread the virus to other

people in a room the next time you begin chatting.

Several news organizations reported the bug originated in the

Philippines. Some say the suspect the author is a young male, likely a

bored youth who unleashed the Love Bug without realizing its destructive

impact.

Two lines in the virus code identify the author as

" Spyder, " part of the unknown " @GRAMMERsoft Group "

from Manila. One script line says, " I hate go to school " and

says of the virus's creation, " simple but I think this is

good. " The code is dated March 2000.

predicted that within two to three days most email servers

will be fixed with anti- " Love Bug " software, and the bug will

stop speading via email. Users can also configure Outlook to reject any

message with the " ILOVEYOU " message.

But, he warned, the real threat will surface in two to three weeks,

when infected computer users begin clicking on their own music and

graphics files where the virus was hiding, lying dormant.

" It's the secondary damage that you don't even realize " at

first, said.

**********************

Let's be careful out there -

R. Kovacek, MSA, PT

Email Pkovacek@...

313 884-8920

Visit

<www.PTManager.com>

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