Asian countries fought back on Thursday against an email virus that turned computers into spam machines around the world and was believed to be the fastest spreading Internet worm ever.But experts in China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan said an avalanche of emails caused by the Sobig.F virus could crash servers and slow down computer operations if users did not weed out malicious messages from their inboxes. The Internet worm had tunnelled its way through tens of thousands of computers around the world, they said, infecting Windows systems and using them to send junk mail, called ‘spam’. Viruses appears in Bangalore BANGALORE: Dozens of cyber cafes shut down and home computers blacked out in Bangalore after being hit by two viruses that are disrupting computer networks all over the world. But the software companies in Bangalore said they weren’t affected, thanks to anti-virus measures. “I have not heard of a major network shutdown from the virus, but some parts of some networks might have got slowed down temporarily. In sum, there seems to be no major impact,” Amitabh Singhal, secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India. “What is probably happening is that companies protect themselves well against the virus, but individual machines get hit,” he said. Some cafes were hit because their service provider was affected, but others got the virus in their machines using Windows operating systems. Satyam Infoway said its network was totally free of any impact from the viruses. “We not only run effective firewalls and the latest anti-virus software, but also have taken precautions like sending alerts to our customers,” Sify spokesman David Appaswamy said. Software companies such as Infosys Technologies and Satyam Computer Services also said their operations weren’t affected. Dow Jones Newswires Engineers such as Yi Xiaoyi, who manages some 45 million free email accounts at China’s largest Internet media firm Sina Corp, said panic over the virus called Sobig.F had mostly subsided. “Everyone with an email account stands to be infected bythe virus,” he told Reuters. “It spreads extraordinarily fast and even popped into my own account. Luckily, it can be quickly spotted and is easy to delete.”Yi said the malicious messages — triggered on opening — could be identified by subject lines that say ‘Thank You’, ‘Details’, ‘Movies’ and ‘Applications’. Officials at China’s main anti-virus centre in Tianjin said it was hard to say how many users were infected. The country has more than 68 million web surfers. The worm, the sixth version of the original Sobig virus, was likely written in order to get around junk mail filters, allowing perpetrators to hide and make more money, experts said.The Information and Communication Ministry of South Korea, one of the world’s most wired countries, issued a statement asking email users to erase messages from unknown senders and to run anti-viral programmes. Ryu Dong-soo, a spokesman at Ahn Lab Inc in Seoul, said the Sobig had spread very quickly in the country but did not wreak as much havoc as the ‘Blaster’ virus, which affected hundreds of thousands of computers. He said at least 60 cases were reported to his firm on Thursday, including banks, equity trading firms and the media.In Singapore, where one in three residents use high-speed broadband networks to access the web, Sobig.F is more of a menace to home users than businesses because it attacks users who lack anti-virus scanning software, experts say. “The majority of cases we’ve seen is the consumer base,” said Allan Bell, marketing director for the Asia-Pacific at US-based anti-virus firm Network Associates. Japan’s ministry of economy, trade and industry’s information services division said the country had seen little damage so far and expected limited impact. But an official at Symantec Corp in Japan said older versions of the Sobig virus had infected a relatively high number of computers and the number of victims from the new virus may gradually rise.
