Love Bug bites India, too

MUMBAI, MAY 5: Indian corporates have also fallen victim to Love Bug'', the computer virus which hit the Pentagon and British Parliament...

MUMBAI, MAY 5: Indian corporates have also fallen victim to 8220;Love Bug8221;, the computer virus which hit the Pentagon and British Parliament on Thursday. The damage so far, however, has been considerably lesser in India than in the rest of the world, according to leading anti-virus vendors.

Prelimnary estimates peg the number of corporations which have been infected at about 10 per cent, although it could be higher. 8220;Normally, companies don8217;t like to report they have been infected because it affects their credibility. The actual number of hits may be higher than what has been reported,8221; said Joy Ghosh, country manager of anti-virus firm Symantec India.

Network Associates, which has over 50 per cent share of the Indian anti-virus market, said several large corporations from across the country had been infected. 8220;It has three types of replicating mechanisms and has been spreading very fast,8221; said Farokh Lam, country manager of the Indian arm. 8220;We have got reports from Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore8230;it has been reasonably widespread.8221;

The virus, believed to have orginated from Manila in Philippines, is similar to the Melissa worm which caused widespread damage to systems in 1999. Like Melissa, it targets Microsoft Outlook and multiplies by mailing itself to other addresses in the recipient8217;s address book.

The Melissa had caused 80 million damage, and if reports flooding anti-virus firms are any indication, damage from Love Bug is bound to be far more severe.

Symantec Corporation makers of Norton anti-virus and Network Associates McAfee anti-virus, posted updates to detect the worm at symantecstore.com and mcafee.com on Thursday itself. 8220;Today we have also posted worm removing utilities,8221; said a Mumbai-based security firm consultancy which distributes both software.

Both Melissa and Love Bug are worms. Worms spread across networks as opposed to viruses which affect computers. Chernboyl8217; which surfaced before Melissa and affected many reputed Indian companies and multinationals was a virus. 8220;Typically viruses are more destructive while worms crash the networks by choking pipes and bandwidth,8221; said Ghosh. The Chernboyl virus worked by overwriting the hard disk and in extreme cases, damaging the BIOS.

Story continues below this ad

Ghosh warned that many variants of the Love Bug worm were already loose. A variant is basically the same virus under a different guise. For example, the a variant of Love Bug uses 8220;joke8221; in its subject line instead of 8220;I LOVE YOU8221;. Love Bug and its variants delete .jpg, .jpeg picture files, .mp2, mp3 music files, and overwrite .vbs, .vba and .wsh visual basic and windows script files files with its own code. It also downloads a program that steals all passwords stored on the system and mails it to a Philippines address mailmesuper.net.ph.