We recently brought you information about the Security Suite virus that was rife and once again a computer virus is making the news. Chaos was caused in offices and corporations around the world today as vast numbers of e-mails, possibly millions, were sent out containing a virus. In many offices work with e-mail became impossible as inboxes filled with spam making their services inoperable For the conspiracy theorists out there – this was not an attack on media companies. According to ABC News, Procter & Gamble, AIG and NASA were also affected. I personally thought the nation’s space agency would have better anti-virus protection. If you open your inbox over the course of the next few weeks and see an email with the subject line “Here You Have,” do not open it, and delete it form your inbox as soon as you see it. The email contains a virus that has been spreading rapidly around corporate email users in the United States. It is believed that the hackers purposely targeted the corporate email lists, instead of targeting personal emails.
The virus sends an email to everyone on your contact list, claiming that they are sending you a link to a document. Before chemists everywhere start shouting at me, I know I’m oversimplifying this. It is, however, I’m sure, what Mr. Shih meant. And if you read that again and apply the logic to the industries Apple is a player in, it kind of makes sense.
So, translated, the point is this: no one was ready for the iPhone and iPad. When they appeared, they were so different (here, Apple fanboys will read “superior” while haters will read “inferior”, but whatever your opinion, the difference from what the competition was selling is obvious and, dare I say it, objective) that all their competitors were sent back to the drawing board to try to come up with something even remotely similar. And it took (or will take) a while, several years perhaps, until the competition becomes comparable enough to Apple products’ strengths that Apple starts to slowly decrease its sales growth, and in the long run become relegated to the niche player it’s always been in every industry (with the one big and shiny exception of the digital music player market).
The body of the email simply states that you have the document they’ve been looking for, and directs them to a website. The origin of the virus is still not clear, and experts have been unable to gauge how far the virus has spread. It is clear that many corporate email systems have been infected with the virus.
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Because the nature of the virus allows it to spread by emailing everyone on your contacts list, it has been able to spread very quickly. Although the virus does not appear to have any serious ramifications behind it, the prank is still one that harms productivity in the workplace and has caused problems in a number of companies.
Experts are looking for ways to slow the spread of the virus, so that it does not affect more companies. Opening it will result in everyone on your contact list receiving the email from you. No matter who sends you an email with the subject line “Here You Have,” it is best not to open it.
The advice from McAfee from anyone who receives one of these spam e-mails is not to click the link but to delete the message and then if you have one, contact your IT office. Also looking into the virus is the Department of Homeland Security with reports expected at a later point today from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team and DHS National Cyber Security Division. It’s thought that the rogue e-mail may have been sent in a .pdf format because of recent discoveries of vulnerabilities in Adobe software.
For more on this go to abcnews.go.com. Have you or your place of work been affected by this virus e-mail and if so, what sort of disruption has it caused for you or your firm? We’d be interested to hear your experiences of this e-mail so please do send in your comments about this.
