Infected recipient passed on email virus

NATHAN CROMBIE | 27th August 2007

Malicious email software that blasted hundreds of thousands of messages to businesses throughout Wairarapa has been fingered as belonging to an infected recipient.

Wayne Keating, Centrepoint Computers IT advisor, said yesterday that one of more than 250 recipients of an email from The Radioworks in Masterton was infected with a Trojan programme that copied and sent the original message more than 1000 times to every address to which it was sent.

A trojan programme is malicious software installed on a computer while under the guise of doing something else, he said.

"It now seems a trojan was on one of the recipient's computers and it copied the first message from the radio station and hit everyone else on the list over and over again."

Several reports of the bombardment of emails which lasted about a day from 4pm on Wednesday were also fielded at the Times-Age office, which was itself hit in the attack.

The Radioworks general manager Heather Lucas said on Thursday that she had contacted each of the recipients with an apology about the attack "even though the virus is definitely not ours".