Sex starved virus writers go for revenge

A well-known figure in the antivirus community has become the target of abuse by virus writers after saying they only wrote malicious code because they were spotty teenage nerds that couldn't pull.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at antivirus vendor Sophos, has become the subject of a rant contained in a worm called Parrot, which is currently doing the rounds on the Internet.

One of the effects of the virus is to display a message box which contains the following text. "You better not fuck on the table Graham Cluley, you son of a bitch. I don't even know the lady and she calls me a son of a bitch!". Charming.

Cluley told us that the author of the virus, Gigabyte, claims to be a 17 year-old girl and he suspects 'she' is offended by his oft-quoted disparaging remarks about virus writers. Gigabyte, whose Web site expresses an interest in horse riding and dance music as well as virus writing, has previously replied to messages Cluley has posted to Usenet newsgroup but the two have never spoken or met. For this reason Cluley is not certain Gigabyte is a girl.

As explained in detail here, Parrot is an email-aware worm and companion virus which arrives with the message "Parrot screensaver" and contains an infected attached called parrot.scr.

If users are unwise enough to open the infected attachment the worm will attempt to send copies of itself to all a user's contacts in the Microsoft Outlook address book. It also attempts to spread Internet Relay Chat.

Although incidents of the worm have generated a number of reports to antivirus vendors it doesn't appear to be either particularly prolific or damaging.

At the risk of stating the obvious, users are advised to protect themselves against the bug by deleting files with suspicious attachments and by updating their antiviral protection software. ®

External Links

Write up on Parrot worm by Sophos

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