New Melissa Strain Reported
Jan. 18 -- A new strain of the Melissa virus is making its way to computers from Western Europe to the United States, but this time it has its eyes on the Mac, instead of the PC.
"It's just as dangerous at this point as the first Melissa but it's not as widespread yet," said Kevin Haley, group product manager for Symantec. "We have had less than 10 reports of it but it could spread as soon as people turn on their computers Friday morning we could see more reports."
The fact that it hasn't spread that far and wide yet is because the document which was created on a Macintosh Word 2001 format, only available in Macintosh systems, has to go through the Mac to a PC, according to Haley. Since Apple only has a five percent share of the market, it is not thought to be a huge problem.
"The first person who sent this out had a Mac and probably sent it to PC user running MS Outlook and it hit their mailbox and that is how it has spread so far," Haley said. "If this were sent to a Mac user it would not be able to send itself out."
The risk was called a "status 3" or "medium," according to Haley. It is not likely to have as widespread effect as the virus mostly infects Macintosh systems.
The virus is similar to the same Melissa virus that struck in March, 1999. It is sent by email whose subject line reads "Important message from (username)."
The body of the document in the email says, "here is the document you asked for don't show anyone else." The document is called anniv.doc.
Once opened Melissa will try and send the virus to the first 50 people in your address book. But it only works with MS Outlook, which is not a popular system for Macintosh. The way the bug might spread is unusual since it has to first infect a Mac and then somehow get into that systems documents and then get passed from those infected documents to a PC, Haley said.
"If the Melissa.W hits a Macintosh computer, that user might share an infected file with a co-worker using a Windows machine and a different version of Office," said Haley. "If that user opens the file, that would then trigger the familiar Melissa spam."
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