Latest Windows Virus Seen as Low Risk
Anti-virus experts are watching a new Windows virus that popped up in a few mailboxes Thursday and tries to entice gullible users with references to the upcoming anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Known alternately as Neroma or the 911 virus, the new piece of malware is considered a low risk as it doesn't do any damage to infected machines. It uses the familiar pattern of looking through users' Outlook address books and mailing a copy of itself to each address it finds.
The virus arrives in an e-mail with a subject line reading, "It's near 911!" The body of the message says, "ice butt baby!" and the virus-infected attachment is called 911.jpg.
The virus's length is 5,632 bytes, according to an analysis by Symantec Corp., of Cupertino, Calif.
Neroma is written in Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Basic language and is packed with UPX. Despite its attempts at social engineering, anti-virus vendors don't expect Neroma to spread very well.
