Michael Vatis of the FBI-run National Infrastructure Protection Center said NewLove is the next stage of virus evolution after the Love Bug. It evolves, not in a biological sense, but in the sense that people take the code from the initial variant and then change it in ways that try to evade the anti-virus software that's been put out for the initial variant. All the major antivirus companies have already released software to protect against NewLove. NewLove hasn't spread as quickly as the original virus for several reasons, said Graham Cluely, spokesman for the Sophos anti-viral firm in England. Computer users may be more wary of suspicious e-mail attachments because of the Love Bug, he said.
Outbreaks seem to have been caught relatively early.
And every time the virus mutates, it grows in size, eventually becoming unwieldy and alerting system administrators to its presence by slowing down e-mail servers much earlier in its spread than the Love Bug did. The government started alerting its agencies at 2 a.m. ET today, Vatis said. The FBI has opened an investigation into the virus, but NewLove will be harder to trace than the Love Bug. The first virus had addresses in its internal code that pointed to its author. Investigators have traced the original Love Bug to the Philippines, where an ex-computer student named Onel de Guzman is under suspicion of having written the virus.