The computer virus Melissa first hit late in the month of March 1998, making it more than 10 years old now, and caused havoc in large governmental, educational and military institutions as it spread itself through word macros that were attached to emails and asked the user if they wanted to open the attachment.
An outbreak of the computer virus Melissa can cause email servers to be overloaded, computer memory to be lost and the eventual crashing of individual computer and computer networks.
Variants of the Melissa computer virus can infect word documents with the infamous list of pornography sites if the virus is opened at a time that is embedded in its coding. A very common variant of the virus is called papa and is spread by infected excel files
The computer virus Melissa is also quite crude, as it is sent from your email address. The content of the list.doc is a meticulous compilation of pornographic sites on the Internet, which is of course not the kind of file to be viewed by valued business colleagues and friends.
Word 97 Affected
This virus is a Word 97 macro virus with a deadly ability; it has the capability to regenerate itself and is very hard to contain with the use of email. When the document infected by Melissa is opened for the first time the virus checks, whether the user’s computer is installed with MS Outlook. If it finds Outlook the virus sends email to 50 addresses found in the address book of the outlook. The virus can only be spread when using the Outlook, if the user is not using Outlook, the virus will not try to spread on its own using other email.
The program is somewhat devious in that it sends itself from the email addresses of people who are likely to be familiar contacts, arriving as email with the subject line “Important message from…” followed by the sender’s name. The body says “Here is that document you asked for … don’t show anyone else.” The email includes an attached Word file “list.doc,” which includes the porn sites’ addresses.
The virus doesn’t appear to cause any damage to infected computers except in rare cases when the minutes of the current time match the date–for example at 4:26 p.m. on March 26. In this instance, the virus will insert the Bart Simpson quotation, “Twenty-two points, plus triple-word-score, plus fifty points for using all my letters. Game’s over. I’m outta here” into a user’s active document.
Somewhat like the mathematical progression of a pyramid scheme, the Melissa Virus sends 50 copies of its self to others. Then they each send 50 copies (that’s 2500) then those 2500 send 50 to 125000, then they send 6,250,000. In just 6 hops the nasty Melissa virus could be sent to over 300 million people. There’s a very real possibility that the virus could overwhelm mail servers.
Although the Melissa computer virus on its own is not very physically damaging to your computer it is certainly an obnoxious pheromones to have to contend with. All it seems to do is embed its signature message into the first fifty email addresses listed in an Outlook Express program and send out them out with the offending attachment, and well, who would want to have a virus in their computers? This just proves how vulnerable our computers are; soon a more deadly virus may come and infect us.
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