Virus expert loses his head
Online July 17th 2003
A new worm - which isn't in the wild - has been identified. Its called W32/Coconut-A and is spread by email and takes the form of an executable file that launches a fair ground coconut shy game. The more points end users score, the fewer files the worm tries to infect,
SecurityNewsPortal reports.
The twist is that users score the most points for literally throwing coconuts and knocking the heads off of notorious Belgian hacker, Frans Devaere, and the senior technology consultant at the anti-virus company Sophos, Graham Cluley.
The game awards one point for knocking off Devaere's head and two points for knocking off Cluley's. The more proficient the user is at playing the game, the less files the worm will go on to infect. For example, if the user gets no points, the worm infects six files; if they get one point, five files will be targeted; and so on.
The female belgian hacker known as Gigabyte has admitted to writing this worm and this is the second virus she has written dedicated to Cluley and follows the Parrot worm which was released in mid-2001. Gigabyte has centred her attention on Cluley since he claimed that the majority of virus writers are male.
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