One of these days you windoze drones are going to get tired of these 
regular beatings and get Macs. But I suspect the average Windoze user is 
a bit of a masochist anyway.

Anybody know where Bently is and where he moved his damn web site this 
time?

 Jim

Sender: Richard Taylor  Date: 6/11/99 8:05 PM

>Please note the following has been received from a number of email/IT
>sites.
>It sounds pretty real, so I have passed it on.
>If this is just SPAM then I apologise, but in this instance, better safe
>than sorry.
>
>Richard Taylor
>
>-------------Forwarded Message-----------------
>
>Dangerous Email Worm Crawls Net
>by James Glave 
>WIRED MAGAZINE
>
>3:00 p.m.  10.Jun.99.PDT
>Both Intel and Microsoft closed down large sections of their email networks
>on Thursday in an effort to control a new, hostile Internet worm that may
>be more dangerous than the Melissa virus. 
>The worm, known as W32/ExploreZip.worm, infects the systems of Microsoft
>Windows users. It travels via email and deletes Microsoft Word, Excel, and
>PowerPoint files, as well as files with the extensions .c, .cpp, .h, and
>..asm. 
>
>"Melissa had a harmless payload but a high proliferation," said Jeff
>Platon, vice president of sales for McAfee.com. "This has the ability to do
>very serious damage in terms of payload because it is an automatic [email]
>reply from an apparent trusted source." 
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-
>See also: Melissa, Spawned by Spam 
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-
>
>Platon said that early estimates of victims run in the thousands to tens of
>thousands of individual machines. He said it would be a few days before an
>accurate assessment would be available. 
>
>Antivirus company McAfee has posted a patch to its Web site that will
>detect the worm, and contains instructions on how to remove it. 
>
>In an effort to halt the spread of the worm, Intel shut down email
>exchanges between offices in Europe and the Middle East. A Microsoft
>employee also said that the company had shut off incoming, outgoing, and
>internal email at the company's Redmond, Washington headquarters. 
>
>The worm is unusually clever in its design. The hostile code replies to
>email with a message containing the same subject line and an attached file
>that appears to be a .zip archive. 
>
>"I received your email and I shall send you a reply ASAP," reads the trick
>email. "Till then, take a look at the attached zipped docs." 
>
>Users who click on the apparent archive to open it receive an
>authentic-looking error message. Meanwhile, the worm immediately searches
>the victim's hard drive for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files,
>and erases their contents. 
>
>An internal virus alert mailed to Intel employees hints at the seriousness
>of the problem. 
>
>"The virus originated in Israel," reads an internal virus alert circulated
>among Intel employees. 
>
>"At this time, Israel is unable to send and receive email. In addition, to
>isolate this virus, the Greater Europe Region [GER] -- Ireland, EMEA, and
>Israel -- cannot send or receive messages from non-Intel sites within GER,
>nor can employees in the region send or receive messages from Intel and
>non-Intel sites in the Americas and the Greater Asia Region." 
>
>Intel spokesperson Adam Grossberg said the company's IT department became
>aware of the worm in the region and immediately began countermeasures. He
>said it would be premature to estimate its effects. 
>
>Eric Chien, senior researcher at the Symantec antivirus research center,
>said there's a key difference between Melissa and WinExplore: one is
>dangerous because it spreads fast, the other because of the damage it does
>once it arrives. 
>
>"Melissa had a huge fan-out. It caused a pure load of messages sent out to
>hundreds of thousands of emails to servers all over the world," Chien said.
>"That forced those servers to basically crawl to a halt and be shut down." 
>
>"In contrast, we don't expect WinExplore to shut down servers due to pure
>load. But what makes it so malicious is that it contains a payload. It
>looks for [and destroys] Microsoft office documents, Excel spreadsheets,
>and PowerPoint presentations." 
>
>Chien said that worm and virus authors are taking advantage of an
>increasingly connected computer world -- and the ubiquitous Microsoft
>software within it. 
>
>"We're definitely at a critical junction in the antivirus world. Microsoft
>Office and Word and Excel's macroviruses [which infected documents from
>those programs specifically] were a huge threat, especially to corporate
>enterprise -- which uses Office almost exclusively." 
>
>Worm writers take advantage of computers that are connected to the Net 24
>hours a day. "Virus writers are using this to spread their worms and Trojan
>[horses] even faster than before," he said. 
>
>Microsoft could not be reached for comment. 
>
>One victim of the worm said she knew something was afoot when staffers in
>her office began receiving the same email from everyone in the department.. 
>
>"We turned off our computers and alerted the help desk, but not soon enough
>-- all our files were deleted," said the victim, who works for a large
>telecommunications firm and spoke on condition of anonymity. 
>
>"I am pretty stoic about it," she said. "I put it into perspective -- it is
>a lot better to have something like this to happen and lose work than for
>someone to infiltrate our system." 
>
>"I hope these talented people will use their genius for good and not evil,"
>said the source. 
>--
>Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'.
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