Virus Could Prove a Real Bugbear

A new mass-mailing virus hit the Internet Monday, and unlike many others of its ilk, carries with it a payload that could do quite a bit of damage to vulnerable networks.

Called Bugbear, the virus installs a Trojan on infected machines that is capable of logging users' keystrokes, which could include passwords and other sensitive information.

The virus arrives in an e-mail with a random subject line and a randomly named attachment. The attachment, written in Microsoft Corp.'s Visual C, is compressed and often contains a double file extension. Once it infects a computer, the virus mails itself to addresses found on the local machine and then tries to spread through network shares, according to an advisory from McAfee Security, a division of Network Associates Inc., in Santa Clara, Calif.

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