Virus Plague Causes Charity to Consider Linux - Development charity ActionAid is developing plans to switch all its desktop computers to Linux, as a way of avoiding the viruses that continuously assault its Windows PCs. The poverty relief organisation, which operates in 30 countries, is on the brink of the move after becoming increasing fed up with the effort needed to deal with recent virus outbreaks, and suffering infection from the Emmanuel bug. Magistr is a polymorphic Windows 32 executable file virus which features the facility to reproduce itself within emails with randomly subject, body text and attachment names. It also carries a destructive payload containing code similar to the hardware destroying Kriz virus. Only deleting one character made the worm undetectable for McAfee.
Old viruses continue to cause havoc.
We urge you to keep your antivirus software updated, apply patches as they are issued, and always scan attachments for viruses before opening. Unless an attachment is one you are expecting, it's best just to delete it. We've Got The Solution. And worse, the development of antivirus software for PDAs and other handheld devices could give virus writers ideas for malicious code that they might not otherwise have thought of. Battling Internet Parasites - The cover article on the August 2000 issue of Discover magazine was about parasites.