F-Secure Virus Descriptions : Papa
X97M/Papa is an Excel 97 macro worm. It's quite similar to the
widespread W97M/Melissa virus, but is probably not written by the same
writer.
The Papa.A variant has a serious bug in it's code and it does not
work. This bug was fixed in the Papa.B variant which is able to
spread via Internet.
Every time when a XLS file infected by Papa is opened, it e-mails a copy of
itself via e-mail, using Microsoft Outlook, to the first 60 people in the
Address Book.
The e-mail sent by the worm looks like this:
From: (name of infected user)
To: (60 names from alias list of the infected user)
Subject: Fwd: Workbook from all.net and Fred Cohen
Urgent info inside. Disregard macro warning.
Attachment: XPASS.XLS
If the attached file is opened, it looks like this:
It is important to notice that Dr. Fred Cohen and the website at all.net
have nothing to do with the worm. Authors of this worm simply want to
harass him. In addition, the worm will try to overload the all.net web
server by repeatedly pinging it.
The worm won't spread further to other XLS files, it just mails
XPASS.XLS around.
[Analysis: Mikko Hypponen and Katrin Tocheva, F-Secure]
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