Posted by Virus Bulletin on Jan 3, 2003
Proving that mistakes can happen to us all, it seems that W32/Winevar.A was not the only virus 'story' to have arisen from the AVAR 2002 conference in Korea.
It seems that W32/Winevar.A was not the only virus 'story' to have arisen from the AVAR 2002 conference in Korea. While it seems likely that the release of the W32/Funlove.4099-dropping Winevar virus was timed to coincide with the event (infected messages may contain the subject line: 'Re: AVAR(Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers)'), another 200-odd copies of Funlove were merrily stowed away at the anti-virus conference itself.
Proving that mistakes can happen to us all, a red-faced and highly apologetic AVAR (Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers) Administrative Office reported in December that the AVAR 2002 conference CD-ROM contained an inactive version of W32/Funlove (virus code embedded).
The organising committee's investigations into the matter revealed that the CD-ROM's autorunner.exe file had become infected at the CD printing facility, where anti-virus shareware Turbo-vaccine was used to disinfect the file. Once back in the hands of the AVAR organising committee, anti-virus products from a number of vendors - Network Associates, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Ahnlab - were used to check the final product. On attaining no detections or alerts, the safety of the CD was verified and it was distributed to the conference delegates. However, following the discovery of viral code on the CD-ROM, a number of different AV packages - including those produced by Kaspersky Labs, Computer Associates, DialogueScience and H+BEDV - were found to pick up on the file, generating an infection alert, while Sophos's product alerted on a viral fragment.
The embarrassed committee have offered to replace delegates' CDs with copies that do not contain virus code and have requested that the original versions be returned or disposed of
Posted on 03 January 2003 by Virus Bulletin
