NEW YORK -- The "Melissa" computer virus has proved to be a very unwelcome guest, turning the digital superhighway against its own users by swamping thousands of computers with bogus e-mail.
The virus began to show up Friday and spread rapidly on Monday, slipping into systems via e-mail and forcing computers to fire off dozens of infected messages to friends and colleagues.Once opened, the virus immediately reads the user's e-mail address book and sends an infected message to the first 50 entries.
People whose last names begin with "A" or "B" have been particularly beleaguered by Melissa because most e-mail address books are arranged in alphabetical order.
Although the virus apparently causes no permanent damage to a computer, its clogging effects were far-reaching. All new Microsoft Word documents created on an infected computer will contain the virus, too.
Companies reporting problems included the chemical company DuPont in Wilmington, Del.; electronics maker Honeywell Inc. in Minneapolis; Lockheed Martin, the aerospace company in Bethesda, Md.; The Associated Press Broadcast Services in Washington, D.C.; and Compaq Computer Corp. in Houston.
Michael Vatis, a federal prosecutor and director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center in Washington, said military and government computers were sabotaged, along with thousands of other institutions' systems.
The FBI is investigating. A software developer, Richard Smith of Phar Lap Software, has given the bureau evidence that the virus may be the work of someone who wrote and distributed a similar program two years ago, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
Smith said there are computer "fingerprints" from someone who uses the moniker VicodinES all over the Melissa virus.
"It's pretty clear that VicodinES is somehow related to all this," Smith told the newspaper.
To make matters worse, a similar virus called Papa was discovered Monday. Papa sends out even more infected e-mails than Melissa, though it has a bug that sometimes prevents it from working, said Srivats Sampath, of McAfee software, a company that makes antivirus software.