THOMAS DEVE, Harare | Thursday
A DEADLY computer virus has run amok in Zimbabwe, hitting possibly hundreds of unsuspecting e-mail subscribers. One of the worst hit companies is The Daily News. The newspapers main e-mail address was yesterday bombarded with hundreds of messages carrying a computer virus that steals documents from a users files or even destroys documents resident in a computer hard drive.
Investigations yesterday revealed that many other Zimbabwean e-mail users, whose documents are currently in circulation, are not aware of this development.
The mail intercepted at The Daily News shows that subscribers whose mail and private details were being literally stolen and circulated, were mainly from banks, insurance companies, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), universities and the media.
Some of the documents stolen included minutes of meetings at First Bank and Econet, as well as the confidential memos of members of staff at The Financial Gazette. Messages from Cottco and various subscribers at Nicoz in Bulawayo have been hit, while a Chapman Golf Club document whose subject is Checklist ZPGA has been circulated by the virus. Many messages from academics and universities were similarly forwarded to e-mail addresses.
All the documents carry a random file name with doc., bat., ink or pif appended to them.
The body text of the e-mail attachments carries a simple message such as, “Hi! How are you? I send this file in order to have your advice. See you later. Thanks” or “Please let me have your comments.”
Zimbabwe Online (ZOL), an ISP whose servers are equipped with anti-virus software, has warned that the virus could devastate the countrys networked computer systems.
“Over the past few hours, we have been intercepting this virus at the rate of seven per minute, said David Behr of ZOL.
“If the virus gets into your computer, it will send copies of itself to everyone on your e-mail address book and it also attaches some of your documents and sends those to the recipients, potentially circulating your company information to a wide audience,” he warned.
Meanwhile, Jacob Jackson of Reliant Computers has warned people to read any virus warning message. He urged them to delete any message whose content approximates what The Daily News has intercepted. — The Daily News * The SirCam virus is at large in South Africa, where it seems to be better contained by anti-virus software. Internationally, it has become the primary threat listed by major anti-virus companies. But it’s less destructive than it could have been; it only does its worst 1 in 50 times it infects a new PC, that worst being to destroy hard drive contents and fill them with text.
SirCam is considered by experts technically most ingenious for propagating itself via its own e-mail program and mail lists. (Viruses infect your files and spread through their exchange – worms spread directly via email or other inter-PC communications.)
Its habit of spreading itself with your confidential documents — or images — attached, gives it the potential to cause a fair measure of social, as well as digital, havoc.
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