UK corporations brace themselves for virus attacks

UK corporations are bracing themselves for catalogue of security nightmares this week as the 'Thursday' virus ravages corporate desktops and the '9999' bug comes into effect.

Security specialist, Network Associates, has put corporate IT departments on red alert after detecting the virus early this week.

Justin Grieg, technical director at the company, described the virus' movement so far: "It looks like it started in one individual finance company in the US and then quickly spread to around 15 companies towards the end of this week. Most of these companies are in the UK so we're watching its movements carefully."

The virus is hard to detect because it lies dormant in PCs running Word 97 until 13 December when it will be triggered into life. It carries what Network Associates describes as a potentially destructive payload that will attempt to delete all files on a user's C: drive.

The 9999 problem will be kicked into effect on Thursday. In some older computer code, 9999 is used as a command to end a program. As this is also Thursday's date (9/9/99), some programs may come to an unplanned end.

However, the bug is considered to be less of a problem by most security experts as it will only affect older mainframe-based systems.

Graham Welch, regional director at security firm, Security Dynamics, said the date problem will be rare. "People should be taking due care and attention with this sort of issue, if there's a problem it's on the head of the IT director", he said.