Virus Update - Melissa & CIH

In this section you will get a brief description on the latest Virus attacks on the Net or may I say the Virus trends on the Net.

The Melissa Virus
Recently the Melissa Virus had created a real Havoc on the Net , crashing thousands of systems right from a personal user to big blue chip companies.Actually Melissa is a Word 97 Macro virus creates using the VBA built-in language of Word.It is also called as W97M/Melissa.A .

It is sent via a E-mail attachment & is mostly infected by receiving the virus through Outlook Express.
This Virus infects Word 97 documents. The opts a peculiar way of spreading itself on the Net, it e-mails itself to hundereds of users through Outlook Express.It takes the e-mail addresses from the infected persons Address book which is present in Outlook Express. The virus first infects the Normal.Dot file in Word. It autoruns everytime you open Word.

The Format of the E-mail message sent by the Virus is as follows,

FROM : <infected persons e-mail address>
TO : <upto 50 e-mail addresses/contacts in victims Address book>
SUBJECT : Important Message From <infected persons name>
BODY : Here is that document you asked for....Don't show anyone else ;-)
ATTACHMENT : <Infected Word document contaainig the Virus>

If you want to check whether your system is infected by this virus , then check-out the following registry key,
Run Regedit & goto HKEY_Current_User/Software/MicrosoftOfficeMelissa?
against this key if you see the following string, "...by Kwyjibo" then your system is infected or had been infected by Melissa Virus.

Protecting your system against Melissa or any other Macro Virus.
To take a precautionary measure to safe guard your system against virus attacks install a good antivirus which may gaurd your system from all sorts of virus attack including Macro viruses.Some of the good antivirus tool kits which are prefered are,
* Norton Anti-virus
* F-Prot
* Dr. Solomon's Antivirus Toolkit
If you want to protect your system by Macro viruse's then,
1) Open Ms Word , Goto Tools --->Options
2) Then Select the General Tab & check the Macro Virus Protection check box.
This will be like a precautionary measure to protect you from macro virus attacks. This act will give a warning before running any file containing Macro in it.

Chernobyl Virus (Alias CIH)
This is a hidden virus mainly infecting the Flash BIOS in your system. The most vulnerable OS are Windows 95 and Windows 98, but NT system files cannot be infected by this virus. This is a highly spread virus & attempts to infect your memory & wipe out or modify the Flash BIOS of a infected computer.As BIOS is responsible to control all the major functions of a computer such as controlling Hard drives , Floppy drives , Keyboard etc. The shocking thing about this virus was that it triggered only on the 26th of April & chances are that it may attack on every 26th date of a month. This virus is probably sent via a E-mail attachment, the e-mail is attached with an executable EXE file which contains this virus or is infected by CIH

Protection against CIH
For complete protection against CIH do visit Symantec Antivirus research centre.

That's all on this Virus Update.