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Feared computer worm not so scary in Asia, Europe |
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Monday, 06 February 2006 |
A malicious computer worm intent on creating worldwide headaches on Friday caused relatively little damage in Asia and Europe, although a city in Italy shut down their computers as a precaution.
Experts have warned that the worm, known by the names "Kama Sutra," "C-M-E-24," "BlackWorm," "Mywife.E," or "Nyxem," was set to strike infected computers at midnight, corrupting the most common types of computer files.
But many companies and individuals took precautions, cleaning up and protecting their machines this week, and officials in Asia and Europe say theyve found little evidence that the worm has caused any major damage.
"Its been pretty quiet," Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for Finnish security company F-Secure Corp, told the Associated Press. "We know the word is out there."
"Its well past the deadline but we havent confirmed any cases of the Kama Sutra in Japan, which suggests were not looking at a major outbreak, said Itsuro Nishimoto, an executive at Tokyo-based computer security company LAC Corp.
In Milan, Italy, technicians switched off more than 10,000 computers after discovering the infection Thursday and decided they didnt have enough time to clean the machines.
"It has spread to all our computers," said Giancarlo Martella, Milans councilman for technological innovation and public services. "Knowing how destructive it is, we turned off all personal computers to avoid losing our data."
The computer security company LURHQ reported earlier this week that there may be hundreds of thousands of machines already infected with the worm, mostly in India, Peru, Turkey and Italy.
The worm was programmed to go to work as of midnight Friday, Feb. 3 and the third of every month thereafter, overwriting or corrupting the most common types of files -- Microsoft Windows Office documents, Word documents, Excel spread sheets, and PDFs (portable document format).
The creators of the virus have tried to trick people into opening e-mail attachments by falsely claiming they contain pornographic images or videos.
When users click on the attachments, their computers become infected with a worm which burrows itself deep within Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98 and Windows ME operating systems.
Protecting your system
Computer security companies have been recommending that people run anti-virus programs, or risk finding out the hard way they have the virus -- when they lose computer files or their computers start to run slowly.
Canada AMs technology expert Kris Abel says people can also protect their computers by ensuring they have the most up-to-date anti-virus and firewall protection.
He said people can also visit the following web pages, which have small programs a user can download to check their systems and remove the worm if it finds it:
* symantec.com
* mcafee.com
* f-secure.com
Abel notes, however, that if any files have already been damaged, "unfortunately those are lost."
"But the good news is, most of us are probably not going to be affected by this. If you have anti-virus software, you shouldnt have to worry about this. If youre someone whos very careful about e-mail -- you dont know who its from and it sounds strange and you delete it -- youre doing well."
Besides being careful about opening email messages and attachments, experts say users would be wise to back up their most valuable computer files on an external device such as a CD, zip drive or DVD.
The worm will not affect machines running on different operating systems such as Mac OS. |
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