NEWS 31.03.99: 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 antivirus 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.
31.03.04: The appearance of variant iterations of the Melissa virus is a further indication of quite how much this one infection changed out understanding of the computer virus.
Nowadays it is common place for a virus to keep reiterating with subsequent versions B, C, D, E and F commonplace and even later letters of the alphabet getting an outing.
No virus has completed the alphabet yet, but Netsky is getting perilously close, with the appearance last week of Netsky.P causing CA's security chief Simon Perry to comment "we may yet wrap through the alphabet on this one within a few weeks".
Since then Netsky.Q has appeared and it won't be long before the desire to alter, improve and doctor code sees a 26th iteration use the .Z extension for the first time.
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1. Melissa Tachigawa
the melissa virus is offensive in my opinion. You see, we share the same name. You know what? No one ever asked me if I wanted a virus named after me. I am offended!! GRRRR!!!