New virus out 'in the wild'

By Rachel Lebihan, ZDNet Australia News 28 February 2001

A new virus is in the wild and ready to strike unsuspecting computer users but whether or not it reaches epidemic proportions remains to be seen.

The virus is sent via email with the subject "My baby pic!!" and there have been two reports of it in Asia and one in the US, according to virus protection provider Trend Micro.

The body of the message is "It's my animated baby picture", it comes with an attached file: mybabypic.exe and distributes itself to all email addresses found in the MS Outlook address book.

Trend has pushed the virus up to "yellow alert", which means it's of medium alert status.

"Some customers have reported that it's out there and it's spreading but not at a very high rate at the minute," Trend Micro's Andy Liou told ZDNet.

It's out there "in the wild", which means customers are more likely to be infected with it that if it was "in the zoo", Liou explained.

Of the 30,000 computer viruses out there, 95 percent of them are in the zoo - they have no chance of survival in the wild, according to Liou.

Last year there were only three or four viruses that made it to the red alert stage, the next stage from yellow alert.

"It's hard to say whether this one will," Liou said.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/dailynews/story/0,2000013063,20205812,00.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 01, 2001