April 19, 2000

Downing Street Computers Reportedly Infected by Russian Macro Virus Says Russian Paper

Ahead of Vladimir Putin's visit to London, Russian hackers decided to familiarize the British prime minister, Tony Blair, with Russian folklore. A virus of Russian origin recently infected all the computers at 10 Downing Street. The ZDNet news agency reports, citing the local press, that the presence of the virus was revealed by the fact that proverbs and sayings such as "He who shoots last laughs longest" and "Don't leave until tomorrow what you can drink today" began to appear on the screens of the infected computers.

The Russian virus that filled the network in Tony Blair's home arrived at the British government's Central Office of Information in an e-mail. The information contained in the letter appeared so important to the employees that they instantly forwarded it to all members of the prime minister's staff, who immediately had the opportunity to acquaint themselves with masterpieces of "Russian thought". The subtle Russian humor clearly made no impression on the British: neither the UK mission in Moscow nor the British prime minister's press service in London was able to comment for `Izvestiya' on the appearance of the virus. The officials are probably reluctant to admit that a virus could infect government networks at all.

It has emerged that the virus, which is called Macro.Word97.Proverb, is already known in Moscow. An `Izvestiya' correspondent was told at the office of one of the leading fighters on the antivirus front - the Kasperskiy laboratory - that it first came to notice in mid-March. Now it will most probably be dubbed "Downing Street".

It is a macro virus; in other words, not an independent code, but a code attached to a specific program. In this case the carrier is an ordinary Word 97 file. Unlike its aggressive colleagues, "Downing Street" appears totally harmless. Its only function is periodically to display in a Microsoft Word window the text of one of its 160 built-in Russian proverbs, each of which is a free and playful interpretation of an existing saying. Most of them are like the remarks of the showman Nikolay Fomenko. However, the virus's collection also includes frankly obscene expressions.... [newspaper's ellipses] However, according to Mikhail Klimchenko, technical director of the Kasperskiy laboratory, the writers of viruses (and 35,000 of them have now been registered) generally prefer to conceal not only their name, but even their nationality. So, the incident in the British government is more the exception than the rule.

In Russia, government computer networks are protected by the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information [FAPSI]. The department's press service told `Izvestiya' that something like the London incident could scarcely happen to Kremlin and White House [government] computers. Of course, the web pages of Russian bodies of power are sometimes subjected to hacker attack, but these attempts are immediately stopped.

http://www.russiatoday.com/features.php3?id=152777

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 19, 2000