First published: 02nd May 1997
During the past week, there has been a lot of interest in Hong Kong about a new macro virus commonly called "Pretty Girl". It is a WordMacro virus for Chinese Microsoft Word that, when it activates, challenges the user to play a scissors-paper-stone style drinking game. It displays a picture of a bikini-clad woman, which is replaced by pictures of less-clothed women if the user wins.This is actually the latest member of a virus family called Eraser. Indeed, the official name for this virus is WordMacro/Eraser.O:Tw. There is also a second version (trojan/Eraser.P:Tw) that contains a larger number of pictures and which is, technically, a trojan rather than a virus, i.e., it is not capable of making copies of itself. There are currently 19 members of the Eraser family, all written for Chinese Word. They include two trojans and three "intended" (i.e., the author intended them to be viruses, but they do not work) and they were probably produced by the same person or group in Taiwan.
WordMacro/Eraser.O:Tw is unlikely to become a common virus because it is too obvious. It increases the size of infected documents by almost 300KB and it has a very noticable activation routine. However, it has been available via the Internet, on an ftp site in Taiwan, so people might have downloaded it as a joke or to embarass colleagues. In it's present form, it is restricted to users of Chinese Microsoft Word.
All of the above restrictions are true of trojan/Eraser.P:Tw too, it's size is over 1MB, plus, as it is a trojan, it cannot spread itself.
Users who are concerned about these can download a macro definition file to use with F-MACRO and Windows versions of F-PROT from the following location:
F-Secure: http://www.f-secure.com/en/web/labs_global/removal-tools
It is the concept of a "pornographic virus" that has caught peoples attention. However, this is not the first virus with a sexual theme, many viruses contain suggestive or rude text messages, Bombtrack was distributed with an erotic animation in 1994 and Big Caibua features an animated phallus.