New version of Melissa virus said spreading

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/0,1643,500302071-500483117-503322864-0,00.html

Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON (January 21, 2001 12:52 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com)
- A new version of the Melissa virus that crashed computer networks
two years ago by clogging up e-mail systems is back, experts warned
Friday.

"This virus could become very widespread rapidly," F-Secure
Corporation, a Finnish-based software company, said in a statement
from its California offices Friday.

Melissa.W is a version of Melissa.A, which spread around the world as
an e-mail chain letter in March 1999.

"It's not really a new version of the virus (but) the format of the
infected file has changed," the company said.

The virus comes as part of a file named "Anniv.doc" in Microsoft Word
2001 for Macintosh format.

"This is problematic, as several anti-virus programs are still unable
to handle this new file format, but the file and the virus is fully
functional under both Macintosh and Windows versions of Microsoft
Office," according to F-Secure.

Symantec, an anti-virus software group in Cupertino, Calif., said the
new Melissa virus spreads via e-mail with the subject line displaying,

"Important Message From (user name)," and text which reads, "Here is
that document you asked for ... don't show anyone else;-)."

It said Melissa will send the virus to the first 50 people in a user's
Microsoft Outlook address book and infect each subsequent document
that is opened.

The effect would be similar to a Denial of Service attack due to the
volume of e-mails created.

A 30-year-old computer programmer from New Jersey was charged with
creating the Melissa computer virus in 1999.

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