Monday, August 21, 2000		Latest in IT world

Love bug comes with vengeance

The infamous love bug virus, which created havoc in the corporate world a couple of months back has returned with a new strain. This time the virus struck in Europe and USA and affected business establishment, including banks. The virus, "VBS/LoveLetter.bd," was reported first in Europe and later in the USA. United Bank of Switzerland’s was it’s first target. This virus downloads and runs a programme, "hcheck.exe," that steals passwords from an infected computer. This virus is written in German and while it is in action, people see a résumé for "Knowledge Worker, Zurich". Its original version hit the computers in May and proved fatal for the e-mail system worldwide. This virus also works like the previous one and searches for addresses in the computer’s Outlook Express. It then sends copies of the virus to all email address present in the address book. The virus is sent as an attachment with the mail and contains a file "resume.txt.vbs." Major anti-virus companies have asked people not to open any file with such an attachment. To combat the threat, Microsoft has released a patch, which changes Outlook's default security settings and makes it difficult to launch ".vbs" attachments.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen who has been consistently selling Microsoft stocks right since February is planning to sell 2 million more of stocks, worth more than $140 million, as per the current market price. He has already sold 45.585 million of stocks, worth $4.2 billion. The selling of Microsoft stocks by Paul Allen caught the attention of investment circles, during the episode of anti-trust case judgement against the Microsoft and corresponding roller-coaster in the stock price of Microsoft Corporation. The smart move by Paul Allen suggested at that time a loss of fortune for Microsoft Corporation, which the market witnessed later. Allen is reported to be selling the stocks in order to diversify his portfolio. His latest sales includes 3 million shares valued at more than $210 million that were sold on July 31.

Yahoo! one of the world’s most popular free e-mail service, underwent troubled times during the last few days as a glitch appeared in its service, which prevented e-mail users from availing of the service sporadically or completely during the past few days. Yahoo! has reported that the glitch was finally taken care of and the services have been restored. However, the company was unable to specify the cause of the problem. The world’s one of the largest e-mail portals, like Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, have come across such problems in the past too as problems could crop up for any site and heavy traffic of users brings these sites in the eye of storm in the case of breakdown.