Consumer Watch: On-Site? Next Day? No Way!

Privacy Watch: Viruses That Steal Your Data

The secret turkey glaze recipe is no longer a secret.

The recipe--which sounds quite tasty, by the way--is just one of the documents delivered to PC World by last summer's Sircam virus. One Excel spreadsheet we received had a home inventory listing 13 guns and other possessions as well as the owner's name and address. A letter from a social services agency in South Africa discussed a child custody battle and identified both parents. And one start-up's secret business plan is now in the open.

From a privacy standpoint, Sircam is a very scary virus. It grabs documents at random from a victim's hard drive and then sends the captured documents out to a set of e-mail addresses harvested from the user's address book and from the cached archive of visited Web pages.

By now, you're probably protected from Sircam. (If you suspect you may still be infected, download a tool from Symantec that can get rid of the virus.) But the virus's outbreak demonstrates that keeping a file on your personal hard drive provides no guarantee that it will remain private. Net-savvy viruses can exploit persistent Internet connections and steal files right off your PC. "This is a growing trend we've seen over the past few years," says Vincent Weafer, the director of Symantec's virus lab, referring to viruses that "steal documents and then send them to other computers."

And Sircam, which stole random files from infected drives, was not even particularly smart about how it took stuff. The worst, experts say, is yet to come: The next Sircam clone may look for Quicken files or other sensitive data on your PC. And it won't necessarily send them to other victims. A virus could easily send the files back to its maker, who might put them to some nefarious use.

Sircam offers an important lesson: To protect your privacy, you must have up-to-date antivirus software. Not opening unexpected file attachments also helps. If you can't follow those two rules, don't be surprised if next Thanksgiving all your friends are serving your Secret Turkey Glaze.

--Andrew Brandt