By MICHAEL FOREMAN
The Pretty Park worm which attacked public relations consultant Peter Verschaffelt may be much more dangerous than originally thought.
Mr Verschaffelt received the worm last week as an attachment to an e-mail from Canada and unwittingly passed it on to hundreds of media contacts.
On the same day, antivirus software company McAffee coincidentally upgraded its risk assessment of the closely related South Park worm from "medium" to "high." The reassessment was due to the worm's potential to create "e-mail storms," which can lead to significant network performance slowdowns.
Soon after the attack, Mr Verschaffelt was also informed that if certain chat programs were in use, Pretty Park could open up an IRC (internet relay chat) channel, causing further unauthorised "Trojan Horse" code to enter a system - potentially within 10 seconds.
Mr Verschaffelt told the Business Herald that disaster was narrowly avoided when one of the businesses the worm was passed on to was the New Zealand branch of an international company with numerous offices worldwide connected by a network.
"They didn't have a virus scanner at all. Fortunately they didn't open up the attachment. If they had the consequences would have been truly horrendous."
Mr Verschaffelt hired Auckland-based security consultant Co-logic to help him minimise the damage to his clients, and had nothing but praise for their work.
The Pretty Park infection took place in spite of the presence of an antivirus program called Vet.
But Geoff Cossey, of Vet's New Zealand distributor, Chilli Systems, said: "Vet has detected the original Pretty Park for over five months, and its more recent variants within days of their discovery in the wild. Whether or not users avail themselves of these updates is, of course, beyond Vet's control."
Mr Verschaffelt said his copy of Vet was certainly less than five months old, but he could not be sure when it was last updated.
Virus onslaught far from pretty
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