The name Anna Kournikova was enough. Where countless anonymous hackers have failed, the prospect of a photograph of the 19-year-old Russian tennis player was enough to lure e-mail users to open a message on their screens and promptly introduce a highly infectious computer virus into their systems. Twice as many users were tempted by the bogus Kournikova photo promise than were taken in last year by a similar virus masquerading as a love letter.
The Kournikova virus, which caused logjams in corporate e-mail systems throughout the US and Europe yesterday, presents itself as an e-mail containing the message "Hi: Check This!", along with what appears to be a picture file. When users attempt to open the non-existent picture on systems using the Microsoft Outlook e-mail program, the virus copies itself to every name in their e-mail address book, causing no permanent damage but slowing the transmission of e-mails to a crawl. Inexplicably, the virus also automatically connects infected computers to a Dutch shopping website every January 26th.
Mr Alex Shipp of MessageLabs in Gloucester, England, which specialises in battling viruses, said the virus was spreading twice as fast as the Love Bug, which last year deleted files belonging to 100 million Internet users. His company had intercepted 12,778 copies of the virus from 3,087 e-mail addresses, 2,020 companies and 29 countries.
"We're looking at many millions of people affected in the US and at least a million in Europe," said Mr David Perry, a technologist at the computer security firm Trend Micro.
"This virus is clever, not just because it promises to show Anna Kournikova, but because it was released on a Monday when everyone was going back to work, which is where the big e-mail address lists are."