Computer virus ‘My Party’ hits campus email

By Joseph Tkacik
Staff Writer

There was a computer virus that hit our campus last week called ‘My Party.’ Although the virus was not widespread, it did cause some concern to the GC&SU Office of Information & Instructional Technology.
“The best estimate that I could make is that the virus was only able to infect about 1% of the machines that we have here on campus before it was caught and treated,” said Charles Taylor, director of Network Services. “All of the computers that opened the document were affected.”
The ‘My Party’ Virus reads as follows:
Subject: New Photo’s from my party
Body: Hello
My party.it was absolutely amazing!
I have attached my web page with new photos!
If you can please make color prints of my photos. Thanks!
The ‘My Party’ virus is one that is known as a mass mailing worm, and it drops a back door Trojan on Windows NT/2K/XP. The actual worm itself is harmless and will not hurt your system if it is simply deleted. The attachment that is included in the e-mail may trick some users into thinking that if they click on it they will be taken to a Yahoo Website. Some e-mail clients make the attachment look more like a URL by underlining it rather than making it look like an executable file. Running the attachment will infect the local machine.
“We don’t expect to have any side effects from having this virus on our machines,” said Taylor. “All that we had to do to fix the problem was to go through and make sure that all of our machines had updated virus data files.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Feb 8 2002. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry