By Polly Raymond, 31 March 1999 00:30
NEWS Corporations over the world are under renewed threat from viruses, after hackers successfully mutated the Melissa code. Kevin Street, technical manager at security specialist, Symantec, warned today that new strains of the Word macro virus will start to appear in other Microsoft applications such as Excel. According to Street, the risk of being reinfected revolves around how prepared corporates were for the first offensive. "It depends on the anti-virus software they installed in the first place - some will be protected, some won't," he said. Street advised concerned IT professionals to contact their security software supplier as soon as possible. Hackers managed to create the Melissa variants using source code from the original virus, which was posted on a public Web page by its creator. But Internet service provider (ISP), Star Internet - which claims to be the only ISP to monitor the level of viruses circulating on global email server networks - said that Melissa seems to have disappeared. Alex Shipp, a virus technician at Star, said: "The situation is normal - nothing like it was yesterday. So it may have all blown over." But he added that the reduction in Melissa sightings could be linked to the fact that corporations have cut down on email activity.
In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.
Log in or create your silicon.com account below