Danny Rawlings, managing director of garden product wholesaler Brunnings Garden Products, told ZDNet Australia how his company, with five office employees, was affected by Bugbear.
"It just basically sent everyone in a bit of a tizz for the best part of a day so we basically lost nearly a days productivity," said Rawlings. "We could work one program but we couldn't print anything out."
Rawlings was suspicious when he received what appeared to be an unsolicited personal e-mail, and deleted it. As he did so, he was alarmed to see it briefly flash, and suspected it was a virus- an intuition confirmed when two of the company's printers went haywire.
"This [virus] didn't come as an attachment, it just came as an e-mail with a message like a personal message from one person to another," said Rawlings, who was surprised he became infected from an e-mail that appeared to have no attachment. "I put my cursor on it to delete it, and it infected me."
"The first thing I knew was about 15 minutes later when the printer started spewing out reams of paper, with a bit of hieroglyphics in the top corner, and then probably half an hour after that we started getting phone calls from people we know that we'd sent some really weird e-mails to them, so then we realised we'd been infected."
Paul Ducklin, head of Global Support for Sophos Anti-Virus explained what had happened. "It's very likely the e-mail did have an attachment but it wasn't obviously displayed," said Ducklin. "By the time you looked at the e-mail, realised it was bogus and tried to delete it it's too late."
Old versions of Outlook Express have a flaw that means certain types of attachments are run automatically, without any warning or chance to refuse it, according to Ducklin. Although the attachments are generally harmless, such as music files, the computer recognises them as a program and runs them as one instead.
Ducklin advises installing the patch for this problem, and implementing procedures to ensure continual updating on an ongoing basis.
I recieved 3 Emails in 2 days from friends and one purporting to be Microsoft all containing KLEZ or Bugbear. The microsoft had as its subject line: "make cheap calls from your PC" or similar.
I run VET antivirus which picked up the attempted infection and I subsequently deleted them. I have checked one friends PC and it appeared to be unaffected, no record of the email sent to me but Microtrends "Housecall" reported that the PC was now "virus free" which implies that it was infected. This is getting nasty.