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Melissa: The Day After

Many companies are still battling the fastest-spreading virus ever.

By Kathleen Ohlson, Computerworld   

Of about 150 Fortune 1000 companies and other major organizations that called Network Associates about Melissa, 80 percent were infected, said Sal Viveros, the company's group marketing manager for total virus defense.

One customer reported that 60,000 desktop PCs were already affected, and another company said 500,000 e-mail messages were floating around in its system, Viveros said. Fully half of the company's major customers took down their mail servers to stop the spread of Melissa, he added.

Among them: Denver-based Lockheed Martin Astronautics hasn't accepted incoming e-mail since Monday as a result of Melissa and Papa viruses, a company spokesperson said.

Although security software vendor Sophos reported hundreds of calls since Friday, "it's meaningless to put a number on this when it's as big of a problem as this," said Richard Jacobs, company president.

Melissa appears as an e-mail attachment from someone the user knows with "Important Message From ..." in the subject and "Here is that document you asked for ... don't show anyone else ;-)." It includes a document of pornographic Web sites named "list.doc" in the message body. Once unleashed, Melissa sends messages to the first 50 addresses of a user's Microsoft Outlook address book.

Vendors Respond Quickly

Network Associates, Trend Micro, Sophos and other security software firms have posted patches and other products to screen for the virus and its offspring "Melissa.A," and repair damage. AThat has caused an enormous increase in traffic on their Web sites.

Network Associates' Web site has experienced a 350 percent increase in traffic over last week. The company was "very lucky" that it had added new servers to its file transfer protocol and Web site two weeks ago, Viveros said.

Despite Melissa's damage, the results could have been much worse, experts said, because many companies took action over the weekend before users returned to work Monday morning.

New Variants Appear

Vendors and customers are now battling another virus, Papa. That virus is aimed at Excel users and when unleashed sends e-mail to 60 people in multiple address books on a victim's system. But Papa has one hitch: It has a bug in it, so it's not spreading as quickly, Viveros said.

As for potential new emerging Melissa variants, antivirus firms said they're continuing to monitor for more outbreaks.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright © 2011 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.