The following e-mail will be sent on your behalf.

 has sent the following story to you from ElectricNews.net.

The story is available from https://electricnews.net/news.html?code=787794

Shockwave is still a high-risk virus
Wednesday, December 06 2000
by Emmet Cole


The "shockwave" or Prolin computer virus, first discovered at the end of last
week, still poses a high risk according to experts.

"Prolin hasn't caused as much damage as Melissa. But it's still a high-risk
virus and it's still out there," Kevin Hanley, Priority Data, told
ElectricNews.Net. 



All the major anti-virus companies moved quickly to update their software to
detect Prolin, but companies like Priority Data are still receiving calls from
affected users. 



Like the Melissa and Loveletter viruses, which wreaked havoc around the world
earlier this year, Prolin, is an e-mail worm, which propagates itself by sending
itself to everyone in the infected user's Outlook Express or MS Outlook address
book. Mass e-mailing worms like Prolin have the potential to overload or crash
e-mail servers. 



Prolin, which is also known as "Shockwave" or "Creative", arrives as an
e-mail message with 36,864 byte executable file attachment called "creative.exe".
If the recipient opens up the attachment, the virus crashes the system and also
sends a message to a Yahoo mail account whose owner is effectively untraceable,
, reading "Got another idiot." 



The recipient is misled by the e-mail subject line ("a great Shockwave flash
movie") and the executable's use of a Shockwave icon. 



The subject line of the e-mail reads, "A great Shockwave flash movie," and the
body contains the following text: "Check out this new flash movie that I
downloaded just now ... It's Great Bye." 



The virus is triggered only if the user opens the attached "creative.exe" file.
It will then move all ".zip" and ".jpg" files to the root directory and
append the following text to the regular file extensions: "change at least now
to LINUX." 



The Prolin virus also appends a message, "c:messageforu.txt", which contains
the following text: "Hi, guess you have got the message. I have kept a list of
files that I have infected under this. If you are smart enough just reverse back
the process. I could have done far better damage, I could have even completely
wiped your harddisk. Remember this is a warning & get it sound and clear... - The
Penguin." 



You can download a virus up-date from the international virus protection experts
Network Associates or from the Priority Data Web site. 

http://www.nai.com/

http://www.prioritydata.ie/virusalerts/virusalerts.htm