The Melissa macro virus

Question: A lot of my friends are talking about a virus called Melissa. I guess I need to know more about it, and how to protect myself. – J.L.

Answer: It’s true – a devious new Microsoft Word macro virus, with the full name of W97M.Melissa, is tearing across the Internet and threatening the security of large organizations.

“It’s safe to say we’re bracing ourselves,” said Katherine Fithen, a manager with the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She based her estimate of more than 50,000 infected computers on the voluntary reports the group had received recently.

The macro virus, which can be embedded in e-mail and Word 2000 documents, can pass along sensitive documents via e-mail including those on corporate computer systems. The FBI posted this warning about the virus: “There have been widespread reports of propagation of this virus into commercial, government and military e-mail gateways and systems. The Melissa Macro Virus has the capability of causing a denial of service and degraded computer network performance, which could result in system administrators having to shut-down affected networks and e-mail servers.”

The virus uses Microsoft Outlook to send copies of the infected document via e-mail. If a user opens an infected document, the virus attempts to start Outlook on the user’s machine. If Outlook is successfully launched, the virus will send e-mail to up to 50 people in the user’s Outlook address book, with a copy of the infected document attached. The e-mail subject line reads: “Important Message From USERNAME”, where USERNAME is taken from the Microsoft Word settings. The body of the e-mail message says: “Here is that document you asked for … don’t show anyone else. ;-)”

Both McAfee AntiVirus and Symantec Corporation’s Norton AntiVirus can clean the offensive macro. More information is available at McAfee and Symantec.

According to the Computer Associates web site, Melissa was first discovered by Dr Solomon’s VirusPatrol on the alt.sex newgroup. The virus’s creator may have left a signature. The virus’s author is signed as “kwyjibo”. That’s a word that The Simpsons television series included in an episode about Scrabble. Bart Simpson played the bogus word defining it as a “balding North American ape with a small chin”. An amateur Internet sleuth noted on a newsgroup (an Internet messaging area) that a frequent contributor to the Simpsons newsgroups uses that alias, though it’s not clear that he or she is the author of the virus.

The virus apparently causes no direct damage to a computer’s memory or programs.

If after reading this, you feel you need to add anti-virus software to the list of programs you run on your computer, may I suggest a couple that I think are good. For a free anti-virus, I recommend AntiVir Personal Edition and for a commercial version, BitDefender 9 Standard is both highly-rated and one of the best.