5 years ago...Hackers multiply Melissa virus threat

31.03.99: Corporations over the world are under renewed threat from viruses, after hackers successfully mutated the Melissa code.

Kevin Street, technical manager at security specialist Symantec, warned today that new strains of the Word macro virus will start to appear in other Microsoft applications such as Excel.

According to Street, the risk of being reinfected revolves around how prepared corporates were for the first offensive. "It depends on the antivirus software they installed in the first place - some will be protected, some won't," he said. Street advised concerned IT professionals to contact their security software supplier as soon as possible.

31.03.04: The appearance of variant iterations of the Melissa virus is a further indication of quite how much this one infection changed out understanding of the computer virus.

Since then Netsky.Q has appeared and it won't be long before the desire to alter, improve and doctor code sees a 26th iteration use the .Z extension for the first time.