Sysbug-A Virus On the Prowl

The Sysbug-A virus has been set loose and is attacking "the usual suspects"--meaning that Microsoft Windows users should be on alert, according to one IT security company. According to security provider WhiteHat, those vulnerable to the virus include anyone using Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows ME, Windows NT, and Windows XP. Tom Slodichak, chief security officer at Burlington, Ontario-based WhiteHat, said that Windows users are most often picked on by virus writers simply because of the sheer number of them out there. "If something like 90 to 95 percent of the world's desktop users are using Windows software both in the enterprise and at home, you are not going to go after small pockets of unusual operating systems," he explained.

Slodichak described Sysbug-A as a "classic e-mail virus" which is originating from an account called James2003@hotmail.com. "It's always the same subject line--Re: Mary--and the e-mail claims to have a zip file of photos of a tryst and tries to get the user to click on it and open it up," Slodichak explained. "But it includes an executable that drops a Trojan onto that machine which will enable some unknown party to potentially take full control of that machine at will."

He added that a user wouldn't realize that his or her PC had been taken over immediately, but because the virus releases an unauthorized program or Trojan, the virus writer will have full access to the machine as if he was sitting at the infected computer himself. "The Trojan doesn't cause any damage to the PC immediately. It doesn't erase files, it doesn't cause any misbehavior that the user can detect, but Trojans have been implicated in denial-of-service attacks or distributed denial-of-service attacks such as those on Amazon and eBay a couple of years ago," Slodichak explained.

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