Anna Kournikova hits federal agencies

A pesky e-mail virus that promised an image of tennis star Anna Kournikova attempted to infect the federal government Monday. The Defense Department's Joint Task Force on Computer Network Defense initially reported the virus at 12:50 p.m. At that time, the task force sent out a directive to Defense systems administrators and an advisory to those in civilian agencies. "We are classifying this as orders of magnitude less than the ILOVEYOU virus," said Major Perry Nouis, spokesman for the task force and the U.S. Space Command. "It is more of a nuisance that anything serious." In May of last year, the "ILOVEYOU" e-mail virus swamped e-mail systems across the federal government, sometimes causing lasting damage. In March 1999, the "Melissa" e-mail virus spread quickly throughout federal agencies. Defense and Energy Department computers were badly hit by "Melissa." Monday's virus filled inboxes with the subject header "Here you have ;0)." It carried the attachment: "AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs." The .vbs extension means that the file was a visual basic script designed to install itself on a victim's computer. It then propagated by sending itself out to every user in the victim's address book. The file instructs the computer to open a Web browser every January 26 and direct it to the Web address www.dynabyte.nl. Carnegie Mellon Univerity's Computer Emergency Response Team received "a few dozen reports" of the virus from federal agencies Monday, said spokesman Bill Pollak. "We're seeing a fairly significant number of reports and that indicates it is spreading quickly." The university response team issued its advisory just after 5:00 p.m. noting that the center had received over 70 reports of the virus, or worm, affecting at least 700 computers. While the virus spread quickly, it appeared that its payload was largely benign. Nouis said that the virus was limited to unclassified networks. He said that some antivirus software packages detected the virus, but others did not. "We caught it early," Nouis said. "We're pretty well versed now in not opening mail when we don't know who the originator is." While she has not yet won a Grand Slam tennis tournament, Anna Kournikova is indisputably popular. She was one of the top ten female names searched on the Lycos search engine in 2000.