As If Swine Flu Virus Is Not Enough – We Now Have Swine Flu Computer Virus

Of course it is no wonder that swine flu is on everyone’s mind and everywhere in the news now - it has even managed to somehow force the recession out of our attention. But as if the disease itself was not enough, in Japan there is now a new problem: people concerned with swine flu virus are attacked with computer virus that is distributed under the same name.

Over the last few days many random internet users in Japan have received spam messages by email allegedly arriving from the Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases. The emails (written in Japanese) carry an attachment named “information on swine flu” obviously prompting people to open the document that arrives from a reliable sources - and instead of protecting themselves from the flu virus, people get their computers infected with a new virus.

There is no information on what type of malware the attachment distributes and what harm it will cause to the computer but I believe this will soon be reported by quite a number of unsuspecting Japanese internet users who wanted so much to get some additional information on the disease that they have violated the most important anti-virus protection rule: never open an attachment in an email unless you know the sender and know what the attachment contains.

Honestly, I can’t help but wonder how cynical should one be to use a threat to the mankind like this latest one to attack more computers with viruses. So now that virologists are hard at work trying to figure out how to stop the real virus, the anti-virus software developers will have to join their efforts in fighting this new computer virus.