The Love Bug Virus

A new computer virus spread around the world recently with a vengeance. This virus traveled via e-mail messages entitled "I Love You," crippling government and business computers in Asia, Europe, and the United States. No immediate cure was known as experts were stunned by the speed and wide reach of the virus.

This virus is very similar to last year's Melissa worm that shut down e-mail systems worldwide. "This worm spreads at an amazing speed," said Mikko Hypponen, manager of Anti-Virus research at F-Secure Corporation in Espoo, Finland. "We got the first report around 9 AM on Thursday from Norway, and by 1 PM we had reports from over 20 countries. We estimate that the total number of infected machines is already in tens of thousands. This epidemic might exceed Melissa in both speed and destructiveness."

A worm is a special type of virus designed to spread from one computer to another over any type of network. Its job has been greatly simplified by the Internet and e-mail, both of which allow the worm to strike countless computer systems in just a few seconds.

This new bug is distributed as an attachment to an e-mail message entitled, "I Love You." If you open the attachment, the virus sends copies of the same e-mail to everyone listed in your address book. It then looks for files with .jpeg, .mp3, .mp2, .jpg, .js, .jse, .css, .wsh, .sct, and .hta extensions and overwrites them with itself, changing the extensions to .vbs or .vbe. These files must then be restored from backups- they cannot be retrieved or used again.

According to computer security experts, the main operating systems infected include Windows 98 and Windows 2000 due to the fact that the virus was written in Visual Basic scripting language. Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 users could also be affected if they are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 Web browser. It appears that only Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express are the only e-mail programs affected; however, the virus is also spreading via mIRC, a popular chat program.