ASU relatively unaffected by Melissa virus, but still wary
By Amy Young
ASU WebDevil
The Melissa computer virus that made a vicious rampage across the nation Friday left computing sites at ASU virtually untouched but still cautious.
Melissa has spread across the Internet through Microsoft’s Word 97 or Word 2000 files attached to e-mail messages sent from Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. Once opened, the virus finds the user’s address book and sends the same infected documents to the first 50 addresses listed.
Bruce Millard, ASU’s director of systems integration and management said that he has heard of only three victims of the virus on campus, mainly through the e-mail that ran from the City of Tempe news listservice. Locally, the city of Tempe, Honeywell Inc., Intel Corp., Boeing Co. and America West were infected with the virus but not on a large scale.
"The Information Technology organization’s response to the virus was to send a note to people using Outlook on the central exchange server and to scan the database for the virus," said Mark Royal, manager of Electronic Messaging at ASU.
The note from IT, sent early Monday morning, warned users of the virus’ disguise as a harmless note from a friend. The message subject line says, "Important message from [victim’s name]," while the text of the message is usually, "Here is that document you asked for...don’t show anyone else ;-)." The attached document is usually named list.doc, and contains the names and addresses of a number of pornographic sites.
As for the IMAP servers, which include the Pine e-mail system, ASU is still taking precautions to safeguard against any future outbreaks.
"The Melissa virus transfers itself predominately through the Outlook/Exchange e-mail system. This does not mean that Pine users can not receive the virus. A document with the virus can still be forwarded to them," said Robin Manke-Cassidy, a technical support analyst at ASU.
A Pine user could still theoretically activate the virus by saving the file to his/her AFS space and then opening the file from there.
"We are still in the process of examining the possibility of the virus’ impact on the Pine server. As of now everything seems to be okay," Millard said.
Royal agrees with Millard’s prognosis.
"At this point the prognosis for ASU looks good," he said. "However, everyone needs to be aware of the potential for a virus like Melissa to spread quickly and cause damage to data on individual workstations and to potentially overload central e-mail systems with increased traffic."
A new spin-off of Melissa called the Papa virus was recently discovered and experts say that more derivatives will surface in the future. The Papa virus will send messages to the first 60 people in the victim’s Outlook/Exchange address book every time it is activated, Manke-Cassidy said. The subject message of this e-mail is typically "all.net and Fred Cohen," with the attached Microsoft Excel file path.xls.
Both the Melissa and Papa viruses are released when victims open the attached files, which activates a macro programming sequence in Microsoft Word or Excel. IT advocates that computers turn on the macro protection in both programs to prevent possible infection by these and other macro viruses. |