Free Republic

Thursday likely marked the largest proliferation of e-mail virus attacks in more than a year, according to security company Postini. Postini said that two variations of the Storm Worm virus, which originally spread across the Internet in January, have quickly driven global virus levels 60 times higher than their daily average. E-mail users should be on alert for messages with "love"-related subject lines and an executable attachment that would contain a Trojan virus, as well as messages with "Worm Alert!" subject lines that contained a .zip file full of malicious code. Postini, which is based in San Carlos, Calif., says...

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Computer virus writers attacked thousands of computers on Friday using an unusually topical email citing raging European storms, a security company said. The virus, which the company named "Storm Worm," was emailed to hundreds of thousands of addresses globally with the subject line "230 dead as storm batters Europe." An attached file contained so-called malware that can infiltrate computer systems. "What makes this exceptional is the timely nature of the attack," Mikko Hypponen, head of research at Finnish data security firm F-Secure, told Reuters. . Hypponen said thousands of computers, most in private use, had been affected.