Melissa-Macro-Virus Info

[coral-list admin]

Greetings, this is a heads-up on a Microsoft Word 97 or Word 2000 virus
circulating.  Any mail handling system could experience performance
problems or a denial of service as a result of the propagation of this
macro virus.  A full description may be found at:

  http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-99-04-Melissa-Macro-Virus.html

Here's just the begining of the description:

~~~~
The Melissa macro virus propagates in the form of an email message
containing an infected Word document as an attachment.  The transport
message has most frequently been reported to contain the following Subject
header

       Subject: Important Message From <name>

       Where <name> is the full name of the user sending the message.

       The body of the message is a multipart MIME message containing two
sections. The first section of the message (Content-Type: text/plain)
contains the following text.

       Here is that document you asked for ... don't show anyone else ;-)

       The next section (Content-Type: application/msword) was initially
reported to be a document called "list.doc". This document contains
references to pornographic web sites. As this macro virus spreads we are
likely to see documents with other names.  In fact, under certain
conditions the virus may generate attachments with documents created by
the victim.

~~~~

Microsoft apparently has a patch at:

	http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/ms99-002.asp

~~~