Federal employees didn't want the kind of love sent to them via an e-mail virus Thursday.
Several federal agencies, along with major private sector corporations, were disrupted by the virus, known as "ILOVEYOU" or "love letter" because of the e-mail's subject line. The virus is most frequently spread as an e-mail attachment, and is also an executable program. When run, the attachment, under certain conditions, will send copies of itself to everyone in a user's e-mail address book and affect other files on local drives and on networks.
The virus appeared early Thursday morning. According to Jeff Carpenter, senior Internet security technologist for the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, the center had more than 150 reports of the "love letter" virus as of 10 a.m., which is higher than normal for virus reports. CERT also handles reports from the private sector. Carpenter said the program seems similiar to the "Melissa" virus, which affected computers worldwide last March.
The Federal Computer Incident Response Capability, run by the General Services Administration, sent out a survey mid-day to agencies to assess the damage caused by the virus.
The General Services Administration set up a blockade on its firewall to prevent the virus from getting to users. By mid-afternoon, at least 2,200 messages containing the virus had been intercepted by the blockade, a spokeswoman said.
At the Defense Department, several systems were disrupted, but the virus did not have an impact on the ability of the military to carry out its defense responsibilities, said Susan Hansen, a Defense spokeswoman. "It didn't affect classified systems. The mission of DoD continued unaffected," Hansen said.
The Current News Service, which produces the Early Bird, an e-mail newsletter roundup of Defense news, accidentally sent out the virus message to subscribers.
The Central Intelligence Agency reported that the virus did not impact the agency's classified systems. "The Central Intelligence Agency did experience a handful of isolated incidents on unclassified systems, which were identified and resolved," said a CIA spokeswoman. "The virus had a negligible effect on the agency and had no effect on classified systems."
A Treasury Department official said that because of a global e-mail message sent out in the morning, the effect of the virus was minimized-although it did show up in some Treasury computers.
The old adage, "the early bird gets the worm" rang true at Coast Guard offices Thursday. Because Coast Guard workers tend to arrive at the office early in the morning, more employees were around to spread the virus when it hit around 8 a.m. than at some late-rising agencies. But the Coast Guard was able to warn other federal agencies.
"We were very fortunate," said Scott Bair, manager of IT operations at the Transportation Department. "The Coast Guard headquarters called us early this morning and said they were getting hit with it. In the Office of the Secretary we have our mail protected by a proxy server." A proxy server sits between the Internet and an agency's mail server. "The message was blocked before it ever got to the mail server-we only had two users affected and we cleaned their machines this morning," Bair said.
Officials at Coast Guard Headquarters said that they were "absolutely" still fighting the virus and assessing the damage caused Thursday. They said they were so busy putting out fires that they could not give any details. They affirmed that the virus was swamping their e-mail servers.
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