a new and peculiar virus which creates links to adult Web sites, searches your address book, and makes the e-mails touting them seem to come from you.
And it is not yet known how many PCs have been infected with this virus, says PC World News - but, considering the tactics used by several fly-by-night or very small-scale porn sites, this virus is catching a lot of attention.
"A lot of porn sites realize their income by the number of impressions they tell their advertisers they get," says Jim Kerins, chief operations officer at the National Fraud Center, to PC World. "This is a way of falsely inflating the number of impressions you can get. Especially at these pornography sites, they can get you to come to their sites by hook or crook."
The virus appears in e-mail files with the subject "Check this." According to anti-virus vendor Network Associates, the Visual Basic script worm distributes itself as an e-mail attachment and attempts to involve two common Internet relay chat clients, which are programs used to chat online, PC World says.
The e-mail body has the attachment "links.vbs," the magazine's online news site continues. "When someone opens that attachment on a system that supports Windows scripting, which is usually installed by default on Windows 98 and Windows 2000, worm deposits two Visual Basic script files on the system. A message box then displays XXX LINKS.URL" and asks if the recipient wants to continue. If the person replies "yes," a desktop shortcut symbol "FREE XXX LINKS" is created, linking to an adult Web site." And, the worm also rifles through address entries if you're running Microsoft's Outlook98 or Outlook2000, according to Network Associates.
