“After hobbling computer industry heavyweights such as
Microsoft, Intel and Lucent Technologies on Friday, the little
known macro virus rampaged through dozens of other companies during
the weekend.
“We have gotten reports from 60 or 70 sites so far,” said Jeff
Carpenter, the team leader for incident response at Carnegie
Mellon’s CERT Coordination Center.”
“The Melissa virus is essentially a simple Word macro, which is
a script for automating tasks within Word documents.”
“The most severe damage we see here is stopping an
organization’s e-mail servers — essentially a denial of service,”
said CERT’s Carpenter.”