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PHYSIO  May 2000

PHYSIO May 2000

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Subject:

VIRUS ALERT Love Bug

From:

"Douglas M. White" <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

[log in to unmask]

Date:

Thu, 04 May 2000 21:00:09 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (117 lines)


>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 Melissa 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 Melissa," Richard M.
Smith, 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 Melissa 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 Melissa "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.

Smith 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, Smith
said.


--
*******************************************************
Douglas M. White, PT, OCS
Physical Therapist, Consultant
191 Blue Hills Parkway
Milton, MA USA 02186
P: 617.696.1974
[log in to unmask]
http://members.tripod.com/DouglasWhite/




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