ACAD.Star Virus Invades AutoCAD!

Kaspersky Lab have announced the discovery of a first computer virus that affects the world's most popular PC-based design software AutoCAD (www.autocad.com) originally developed by Autodesk company. The ACAD.Star virus was published on the 18th of July on the Interact at one of the web sites dedicated to virus development by a hacker named AntiState. At the moment, Kaspersky Lab has not received any reports of this virus being "in-the-wild".

It became possible for computer viruses to affect these systems after Autodesk has recently licensed from Microsoft its macro-programming language, Visual Basic Application (VBA). Exactly in this language, macro-viruses are created (now an average of 70% of all virus infections) for the popular' office applications like Word, Excel, Access. ACAD. Star is an extremely primitive macro-virus, 568 bytes in length, written in VBA macro-language, and able to affect only systems running the AutoCAD version 2000. It is primitive not only because of its length, but functionality as well: the virus's author made some fatal mistakes, which nearly disable the virus' capabilities for proliferating under normal operating conditions. Kaspersky Lab anti-virus experts have spent a lot of time and effort to produce a number of virus strains that are good enough to perform a comprehensive analysis. It is nearly impossible for an ordinary AutoCAD user to repeat this "gest" and accidentally create a set of special conditions allowing the virus to propagate. "We classify this case as a "first try," which, as is known, are not always successful," said Eugene Kaspersky,

"However, the discovery of this virus demonstrates security breaches in AutoCAD, which used to be virusless up to quite a recent time. We consider that these vulnerabilities could be further exploited by other AutoCAD-viruses - more vital and even dangerous". Protection against the ACAD.Star virus has was added to the AntiViral Toolkit Pro (AVP) daily update on July 18. However, it is recommended that users set up a universal defence against all types of macro-viruses, including those for AutoCAD. AVP Office Guard, which is based on the breakthrough principles of behaviour blocking and available in AVPfor MS Office 2000 package, gives a true 100% guarantee for full control over all macro-viruses on a protected system.

www.kaspersky.