p2pnet.net News:- Hackers, spammers and spies will, “go into overdrive in December and January, when unsuspecting neophytes unwrap new computers, connect to the Internet, and, too often, get hit with viruses, spyware and other nefarious programs“.

That’s the opinion of Associated Press writer Rachel Konrad.

“Although few researchers produce holiday-specific security data, experts at IBM Corp., Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., software companies and Internet service providers agree that the holidays are prime time for hackers,” she says, going on:

“Holiday viruses are so rampant that consumers could be attacked even if their first online destination is to a Web site for updating security patches.”

Against that (as far as bugs are cincerned, any way) , “Historically, Christmas time has been fairly calm virus-wise,” says F-Secure director of research Mikko Hypponen on the company’s blog, adding:

“The only exception that comes to mind would be the Remote Explorer incident from Christmas 1998. This was the first virus ever to run as a service under Windows NT, and caused a bit of a stir back then.”

Be that as it may, Christmas day saw the activation of the Bacros bug, capable of deleting all files on all local hard drives.

But, “Activation routine like that is pretty rare,” says Hypponen. “We nowadays don’t see destructive viruses too often…most of the new viruses just try to silently take over your machine instead of deleting files. Bacros is in the wild. Over the last months we’ve received reports from several countries. But so far we haven’t received any reports of overwritten hard drives.

“Then again, if you’re hard drive is overwritten, you can’t easily email us, can you?

heh

Anyway, “Bacros.A is a virus that infects local filesystem files by renaming all text files (.txt) as exe,” says F-Secure. “It can also copy itself in floppies and CD-roms. The virus also drops and executes a Word Macro virus W97M/Bacros.A.

“Both, the binary and the macro parts are designed to work together but they can replicate independently. Typical symptom for end users is that they find some of their images being replaced with a pictures that says ‘KUOLE JEHOVA‘ [Finnish for Die Jehovah].”

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See:-
nefarious programs - Hackers aim to sabotage holiday computing, Associated Press, DSecember 26, 2004
Bacros bug - Saturday, December 25, 2004, Weblog : News from the Lab, December 26, 2004
KUOLE JEHOVA - Bacros.A, F-Secure, December 26, 2004

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