“Anti-virus researchers at Network Associates… said Friday
that 10 Fortune 500 companies on three continents have been hit
with a new virus called W97/Prilissa. Prilissa is a nasty
variant on two better known attacks — the Melissa worm
and the PRI virus. The virus depends on the Windows 95 and
98 operating systems and the Word 97 word processing
application.”
“The virus itself looks for a registry key to verify if the
local system has been infected. If it hasn’t, the virus creates a
Microsoft Outlook e-mail message with the subject line ‘Message
From (Office 97 user name)’ and a message body that says ‘This
document is very Important and you’ve GOT to read this!!!’ The
first 50 listings from all address books are selected, along with
an attachment — the infected document… If the date is December
25, the virus runs a destructive payload to overwrite the existing
C:/AUTOEXEC.BAT file with instructions to format the C drive.
“The virus will not run on Windows NT.”