Posted on: Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Anti-virus company raises alert on Beagle

By Tiernan Ray
Bloomberg News Service

Network Associates Inc., the maker of McAfee computer-security software, said the spread of a computer virus named Beagle that propagates through e-mail is accelerating.

Network Associates raised its alert rating for the program from "low" to "medium" because an increasing number of personal computers are becoming infected, the company said on its Web site.

Beagle arrives in e-mail as a message attachment. Once activated, it downloads a second program that receives commands to perform malicious actions on the infected PC.

"The worm was written to look like a new strain, not a variant on any known viruses," said Vince Gullotto, vice president of McAfee's Anti-virus and Vulnerability Emergency Response Team. Most computer viruses the company has seen in the past six months were variants on earlier attacks, he said.

Shares of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Network Associates have advanced 58 percent since Aug. 7, their low for 2003, when companies started buying more protection against worms such as "Blaster" and "Sobig" that attacked thousands of computers worldwide that month, after warnings of the outbreaks were released in late July.

Network Associates doesn't expect to raise its alert rating on Beagle to "high," Gullotto said, and he expects the worm's attack to slow. Beagle was named for the file attached to the virus and is also known by the name "Bagle."

Shares of Network Associates rose 83 cents, or 5.1 percent, to $17.03 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading on Friday.