Virus Update: silicon.com viewers bitten by the Love Bug

silicon.com readers have started contacting us with horror stories from today's "I Love You" virus outbreak.

One network manager, who asked to remain anonymous, said: "I got an email this morning from a trusted source, so I opened it. Then the flickering started. It went out across our European network and then across to the States. We got ten copies of it every minute for the next hour."

Peter Turner, Web developer at Plato Computing, said: "It's a lot worse than Melissa because it spreads faster and actually causes damage. It will be especially damaging to the media, graphics, Web development and content industry because it actually corrupts jpeg files. I've lost half my work."

An anonymous corporate Windows NT user, said: "There are no complex explanations on any of the anti-virus Web sites. Nobody seems to know what's going on."

Scott MacKenzie, Webmaster at silicon.com, said: "Once activated, the virus looks for files ending jpeg, js and MP3 and overwrites them with the virus source code. It also randomly selects one of four URLs and downloads an executable file called WIN-BUGSFIX.exe - this will run the next time the machine is booted up and it is yet not clear what effect it would have."

The source code of the virus claims it was written by "spyder" and includes the text message "I hate go to school".

** Anti-virus firm Network Associates, has released a patch to its VirusScan software for protecting PCs from the "I Love You" virus. The fix is available from http://www.nai.com .

More to follow...