Antivirus vendors rushed earlier this month to develop antidotes to Back Orifice 2000, the trojan horse released by the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow.
Network Associates Inc., its subsidiary McAfee Software, and Symantec Corp. are among the companies which now have remedies available for download to fight the program which was released at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas.
Back Orifice 2000 is a trojan horse, which, when attached to an e-mail or other document, is covertly downloaded into a computer. There it continues to do its damage unseen by the user.
Once downloaded by an unwitting user, Back Orifice 2000 allows someone with access to the other half of the program to remotely control the infected computer. The remote hacker can read and even delete passwords or files from the computer. Back Orifice 2000 affects computers running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating systems, including Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT.
• For information on Network Associates’s Back Orifice remedy, go to: http://www.nai.com/asp_set/anti_virus/introduction/back_orifice.asp.
• For the Symantec download, go to: http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/download.html.
• More information on Back Orifice from Symantec is available at http://www.symantec.com/press/1999/n990712.html.
• There is also information on a virus update from McAfee Software, a Network Associates subsidiary, at: http://www.mcafee.com/viruses/bo2000/protecting_yourself.asp.
— Mary Lisbeth D’Amico, IDG News Service