Joke Virus Spreads Fast, Clogs Servers

Bug is bothersome but benign, experts say

By JAIKUMAR VIJAYAN (June 26, 2000) An e-mail virus disguised as a text file attachment spread widely across the Internet last week.

The worm - which arrives as a joke about the stages of male and female life and comes with many subject headers, including "Funny" and "Life-Stages" - could cause e-mail servers to become clogged because of its ability to quickly copy itself to others via Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook e-mail client once it's launched, antivirus experts warned.

But initial research shows that the worm, called Life-Stages.txt.shs, doesn't damage any files or corrupt data, antivirus experts said.

"It is similar to the love letter (virus) in the way it sends itself out to everyone in your e-mail address book," said Patrick Martin, a product manager at antivirus software vendor Symantec Corp. in Cupertino, Calif., referring to the recent "I Love You" bug.

"The real risk this one poses is e-mail flooding," Martin said. In an assessment of the worm posted on its Web site, Symantec described damage from the worm as low, its distribution in the wild as high and the ability of systems administrators to contain the bug as relatively good.

"This one is relatively benign in that its main focus is to send itself to other people," said Piers McMahon, a business manager at Computer Associates International Inc. in Islandia, N.Y. "But at the same time, it can quickly clog up corporate networks with useless e-mail if it is allowed to propagate."

Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), which posted an alert on the worm, claimed that it had reports of individual users receiving as many as 30 copies of the bug. Some large sites reported as many as 120,000 copies passing through a single server, CERT said.

http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO46253,00.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), June 26, 2000