EIM rates Blaster virus risk factor as medium

Emirates Internet and Multimedia (EIM) has rated the risk factor from the new Lovsan or Blaster virus as medium for both residential and corporate users.

The UAE Internet service provider has "strongly" recommended organisations to update, or buy/download, the anti-virus program immediately, and not to launch any e-mail software programmes until the above precautions have been taken.

In the interim, if organisations are unable to procure anti-virus programs, EIM recommends using the free online anti-virus check-up site http://cc.emirates.net.ae/pls/enews/ISP_Highlight.ISP_Highlights?mSerial=2021. This is, however, only a temporary measure.

While most other viruses are propagated via e-mail, this new worm exploits a recently found vulnerability in the NT, 2000, and XP variants of Microsoft Windows.

Symptoms of the worm are the presence of the file msblast.exe in the WINDOWS SYSTEM32 directory or error messages about the RPC service failing.

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