Virus Update: European companies are still Love-sick

NEWS Copies of the 'Love Bug' virus and new variants are still causing chaos for European businesses, despite the widespread publicity. Alex Shipp, virus technologist for MessageLabs, said activity is still 30 per cent higher than normal, with infected emails hitting the UK from as far afield as Ghana and Hong Kong. He said: "The virus catcher is still trapping far more than normal. We're still seeing companies infected every day - it's incredible." A straw poll of silicon.com viewers found 56 per cent of respondents had been affected by the highly contagious virus. Estimates on the amount of damage caused varied wildly, with many viewers unable to estimate financial cost. One viewer wrote: "We were lucky and very little damage was caused, but the time and effort expended by several members of the IT team and the problems caused by the email being offline were cost factors that are hard to quantify - but it must have cost around £2,000. We were very lucky really." Other viewers criticised their companies for overreacting to the attack. One wrote: "I work for a large computer company and I checked with our local support and they don't have a single example of someone within the company who was infected and lost data. Yet, all email was turned off, systems shut down and countless people were unable to work properly. The loss of revenue because of a perceived threat was far more than any actual damage caused." The managing director of one UK-based company received an infected email from a computer supplier which was checked and passed by Norton AntiVirus software. "If I have learnt any lesson from this, it is that it pays to be vigilant and cynical about email messages, and not to trust even top name virus scanner programs," he claimed. Anti-virus vendor Symantec estimated that between 70 and 90 per cent of European companies received an infected email in the last week. But according to MessageLabs, which handles virus protection for corporate ISP customers in the UK, only 25 per cent of its clients were sent the virus.