Greetings everyone, Members of a professional association I belong to recently received a Virus Alert on the virus described below. Research could find nothing to the contrary. This included checking all known sources including McAfee, the DOE, and the Urban Myth pages. Using AltaVista, search included all possible combinations of this heading and found nothing. Has anyone else ever heard of this virus or are we facing something new here? The premise sounds feasible although a method of dissemination is not explained. Your comments are appreciated . . . Gary Jakl gjaklat_private gjaklat_private -----Original Message----- From: Sent: Friday, March 13, 1998 12:52 PM Subject: The NSF Virus A group of individuals got together because they were pissed off by the National Science Foundation announcement that it would no longer allow direct access to the the backbone of the internet. The NSF contracted with four companies that would be providers of access to the backbone and these companies would then sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies. The group of individuals saw this is a sellout and decided to take matters into their own hands. This April 30, 1998 marks the second aniversary of this change and to "honor" that they have released a virus that will activate on this date. Preliminary reports show that the virus alters key DLL files in the operating system that are directly responsible for connecting to the internet. Once "infected", the virus lays dormant until April 30th. On that day, it activates and rather than delete files, it begins to scramble them. The result is a destroyed file system. Anti-virus companies have not been able to protect against this threat because the virus is so new. They suggest however that you check the file size of your system files against known benchmark file sizes to detect infection. The alternative, to leave your computer turned off on the 30th of April, has proven ineffective as the virus will activate when turned back on.
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