Online Game Spreads PC Virus

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

August 27, 1998 (5:19 PM EDT)

By John Borland,

Electronic Arts' Origin gaming division launched a splashy new marketing campaign Thursday, offering free Web downloads of a much-anticipated sequel to its Wing Commander series.

Problem was, the first copies of the game posted were infected with a virus.

Users who downloaded the game and tried to install it infected their computers with a variant of the same virus that struck hundreds of computers yesterday. Called one of the most damaging viruses in years by some researchers, the W95.CIH virus activates on the 26th of the month, wiping out some computers' flash memory. "It's what we call a fast infector," said Carey Nachenberg, chief researcher at Symantec's anti-virus research center. Once resident in a computer's memory, the virus will quickly spread to any executable file that is opened, copied, or accessed in any other way, he added.

This quick-contagion power can make the virus difficult to uproot, Nachenberg said. Using any of the major virus-scanning software will actually spread the virus to each program as it is scanned.

The virus surfaced several months ago, but did little damage during previous months, researchers said. This month, however, virus-control centers reported possibly thousands of computers affected, with up to 500 machines at a single location infected.

Some users who downloaded the Wing Commander software Thursday said their computers were rendered temporarily unusable after they inadvertently loaded the virus.

Infected computers can be cleaned by restarting from a clean boot disk, Nachenberg said. Symantec also provides a free "Kill CIH" file on its website that can be used with any major virus-cleaning software. The file will disable the CIH virus's replication powers, and let the virus-scan program work without reinfecting files.

Origin posted an apology on its website Thursday afternoon, saying the infected files had been available on its servers for more than two hours. The files were taken down and replaced with clean files by midafternoon, the company said.

Origin officials could not be reached for comment by press time. No information was available on how many computers had been infected by the download.