Audio/Video

MEDINA, Ohio--(BUSINESS
WIRE)--June 1, 2001--Central
Command, a leading provider of PC
anti-virus software and computer
security services, and its
partners today released its'
monthly listing of the top twelve
viruses reported for May 2001.
The report, coined the "Dirty
Dozen," is based on the number of

By promising to display pictures of actress Jennifer Lopez naked, the destructive Chernobyl
virus is again spreading across the Internet via e-mail.

Antivirus-software maker Panda Software issued an alert Thursday after receiving about eight
reports of the virus, including one from a major aviation company. The company discovered the
problem before the virus could do any significant damage.

A new e-mail worm that's just beginning to wiggle its way across the Internet scours infected computers for
image files containing child pornography, and alerts government agencies if any suspicious files are
discovered.

The alert e-mail contains an attached copy of one of the files that allegedly contain child pornography
discovered during the worm's search of infected hard drives, and also identifies the porn possessor's e-mail
address.

Scientists studying how diseases spread believe there are many parallels between computer viruses and biological ones, enough so that when doctors want to know how AIDS engulfed a village in Africa, they may do well to look to their computers.

Contrary to the idea that computer viruses immediately explode into a pandemic, the scientists found that the infection rate starts out very slowly among a small group of friends or a single company.

UK-based anti-virus outfit Sophos is reporting a new variant of the LoveBug Outlook worm which contains a large amount of hidden text, apparently designed to attract the US National Security Agency's Echelon spy satellite network and overload it.

Comments within the executable file include large swaths of text such as:

"NSA national security agency code PGP GPG satellite cia yemen toxin botulinum mi5 mi6 mit kgb .mil mil base64 us defence intelligence agency admiral diplomat alert! BATF," and so on.

Saw this over at SNN

A staffer of Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, a congressional leader on issues relating to electronic security, inadvertently opened an infected attachment that contained the "Homepage" worm. This cause the worm to be mailed to 200 people in the Senator's address book. Luckily, the Homepage worm is not destructive.

Computer worms have tried all sorts of ploys for tricking users into activating them, but the latest is particularly sneaky--it masquerades as a virus warning from Symantec, a well-known anti-virus firm.

Symantec has confirmed the existence of the worm, known as VBS.Hard.A@mm, VBS/Hard-A, or VBS/Hard@mm, and created software to detect it. So far, the virus has a low geographical distribution and has infected a small number of sites, according to a Symantec report published earlier this week.

Cisco has issued an alert warning that a vulnerability in a commonly used routing protocol can be used to bring down service provider's core Internet infrastructure.

The vulnerability concerns BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), which is used for exchanging routing information between gateway host on the Internet, and can be exploited to create network outages.

Cisco said the issue came to light because of a malfunction in the BGP implementation of another (unnamed) vendor, which caused a series of crashes but it admits the problem might also affect its own kit.

The worm, known to virus experts as VBS.VBSWG2, and dubbed Homepage, has been reported
at scores of companies, according to antivirus vendors who say it is likely to hit more firms today.

According to experts, the worm will not cause damage to the computer system that receives the initial e-mail, but could bring down corporate mail servers by sending out thousands of copies of itself.

A virus infection of security fix files on Microsoft's partner and premier support Web sites has forced the software giant to suspend certain downloads for more than a fortnight.

Microsoft issued an alert on Monday, which states that various Hotfix files on its Premier Support and Microsoft Gold Certified Partners Web sites are infected with the FunLove virus.