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Hack.Huigezi Virus Attacks China PCs Rapidly

The Hack.Huigezi virus of 2007 is fast mutating and proliferating in China cyber space. Officially known as Hack.Huigezi, the worm tends to infect one in ten PCs throughout China.

During March 1 to 13, Kingsoft, China's anti-virus company trapped 512 variants of the Hack.Huigezi virus. The virus is a Trojan that functions with multiple controlling programs. Once the hacker is able to install it on a PC, he can steal username, password, photo and confidential files as well as monitor the users' online activity.

An Internet worm that ran wild in U.S. computer systems but has now abated, has perhaps spread to infect numerous computers all over China as well.

According to Lei Jun, president of Kingsoft, the severity of Hack.Huigezi is greater than "Panda burning joss sticks" virus that hit thousands of computers in the country before the spring festival.

Recent reports suggest that one or the other type of virus infect most of China's PCs and since there is widespread use of the Internet in the country, the number of the viruses is set to explode.

In the past, different computer viruses along with their variants had disabled the life of people in China. One of them was Sobig.F, which was prevalent across the country in 2003. In August same year, according to China's Beijing Evening News the Sobig.F infected the country's several thousands of computers. Later a variant of Blaster computer worm collapsed 2,000 intranet systems.

At the time the Blaster worm prevailed, another virus called 'Sasser' exploited the LSASS (Local Security Authority Subsystem Service) security flaw. While two patches were required for the virus, it became tough to determine whether an exploit was due to Blaster or Sasser worm.

As these viruses emerged, Kingsoft announced it would offer free virus scans through China Telecom and ChinaVnet. But these endured for a short period and new variants of viruses began to appear.

The Hack.Huigezi virus attacked almost 258,235 PCs during China's Spring Festival holiday of 2007. According to Kingsoft experts, this virus has limited capacity to scatter but hackers have modified the code in various ways for their evil purposes.

Related article: High-Rise Web Attacks Likely in 2007

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