Tuesday, June 15, 1999
Worm dirties work week
Computer virus spreading via network links
BY BRUCE MEYERSON
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Proving even more infectious than first believed, the computer virus Worm.Explore.Zip sprang back Monday when people logged on to their terminals at the start of the work week.
Computer help lines were swamped with calls after it became apparent that the file-killing virus is trickier than previous plagues that spread exclusively through e-mail. Experts now say it was also designed to spread within an organization through computer networks that enable co-workers to share files.
Worm.Explore.Zip — which infected tens of thousands of computers at major corporations last week — could prove more difficult to get rid of than the Melissa and Chernobyl viruses that struck earlier this spring.
“As time goes on, the programs intruders are using are becoming more complex,” said Mark Zajicek, a member of the government-chartered Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
During tests over the weekend, the team found that the virus would reappear seconds after being removed from a computer if that machine was linked by a network to another machine that was still infected.
Most major corporations, universities and government agencies link thousands of personal computers in networks.
“It only takes one opening, one infected computer within a company, to rapidly spread within that company,” Mr. Zajicek said.
The additional mode of contamination may also render some of the cures posted on the Internet last week less effective, Mr. Zajicek said.
On Monday, the crafty bug's victims even included one maker of anti-virus software.
“It happened here to our chief operating officer, who was running anti-virus software,” said Dan Schrader, of Cupertino, Calif.-based Trend Micro.
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