Anti-virus vendors have rushed this week to develop antidotes to Back Orifice 2000, the trojan horse released last weekend by the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow.
Network Associates, its subsidiary McAfee Software, and Symantec are among the companies which now have remedies available for download to fight the program.
The Cult of the Dead Cow released Back Orifice 2000 at the Def Con hackers conference in Las Vegas over the weekend, calling it an update of its earlier Back Orifice virus. The group is also claiming that Back Orifice 2000 is a good tool for network management.
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 Networks Associates' Back Orifice remedy, go to:
http://www.nai.com/asp_set/anti_virus/introduction/back_orifice.asp.
For the Symantec download, go to: 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
Symantec, in Cupertino, California, can be reached at +1-408-253-9600 or on the World Wide Web at http://www.symantec.com/.Network Associates, in Santa Clara, California, can be reached at +1-408-988-3832 or on the Web at http://www.nai.com/.