new virus

["John Teeter" <johnt@goldhill.com>]

now do be careful:)

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** 'Homepage' Worm Slithers Across Globe

Virus experts are warning of a quickly spreading E-mail worm 
known as "Homepage" that affects users of Microsoft's Outlook 
E-mail program. According to Mikko Hypponen, manager of 
anti-virus research at F-Secure Corp. in Helsinki, Finland, the 
worm was first spotted Tuesday in the United States, but soon 
spread across the world, hitting Australia and New Zealand the 
hardest. The worm is currently battering Europe, but the United 
States has so far dodged serious infection.

The worm arrives in users' mailboxes with the subject "Homepage" 
and the message "You've got to see this page! It's really cool 
;O)." The E-mail has an attached file named homepage.HTML.vba, 
and when an Outlook user opens it, the worm sends itself to all 
the addresses in the users' address books, deletes the original 
message, and then randomly opens one of four X-rated Web pages. 
The worm appears to do no damage to a victim's PC, but in the 
process of forwarding itself, it can crash mail servers with 
excess traffic.

Hypponen says Homepage is very similar to the Kournikova worm 
that infected servers worldwide in February. Both were created 
with the same toolkit. Homepage is the more dangerous of the two, 
he says, because its still-unknown author used the kit to create 
the worm but then altered it so it couldn't be detected by 
anti-viral programs. He says, "It really isn't a fair war between 
us and the virus writers because they have access to our tools." 
- David M. Ewalt

Click here for four ways to protect yourself:
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eDfm0BfOai0V20Nmi0Ah




==== From Gold Hill ====