Microsoft accidentally distributes virus

Thanks to Aqua.NET, from our BPN Forum

Microsoft accidentally sent the virulent Nimda worm to South Korean developers, distributing Korean-language versions of Visual Studio .Net that carried the virus, company representatives acknowledged Friday. Microsoft's flagship developer tools picked up the digital pest when a third-party company translated the program into Korean, said Christopher Flores, lead product manager for Visual Studio .Net. Flores stressed that no other foreign-language versions of the program were found to carry the worm, and he said no systems had actually been infected.

The infected file is stored in the same location as the help files, Flores said, but it's a file created by Nimda, so the .Net program's help system doesn't know it's there and will never reference--or open--the file. It's unlikely, then, that the Nimda-infected file would ever be opened, Flores said. And if the worm did execute somehow, he said, it couldn't spread to the developer's system because the virus only runs on systems running Internet Explorer 5.5 and lower, and Visual Studio .Net requires version 6.0 of the browser.

"There have been no recorded infections In fact it's almost impossible to get the worm to execute on computers with Visual Studio .Net installed. It's extremely unlikely that a developer would ever accidentally get infected by Nimda. They would have to try hard just to run the worm"