[PEN-L:7314] (Fwd) NEW COMPUTER VIRUS THREATENS CORPORATE AMERICA

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Date sent:              Wed, 26 May 1999 15:45:25 -0700
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From:                   Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:                NEW COMPUTER VIRUS THREATENS CORPORATE AMERICA

The Washington Post                                     Sunday, May 2, 1999

NEW COMPUTER VIRUS THREATENS CORPORATE AMERICA

        By Bob Hirschfeld

        A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and 
it is far more insidious than last week's Chernobyl menace. Named 
Strunkenwhite after the authors of a classic guide to good writing, 
it returns e-mail messages that have grammatical or spelling errors. 
It is deadly accurate in its detection abilities, unlike the dubious 
spellcheckers that come with word processing programs.
        The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout 
corporate America, which has become used to the typos, 
misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in 
cyberspace. The CEO ofLoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the 
virus has rendered him helpless. "Each time I tried to send one 
particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: 'Your 
dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off 
by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.' I threw my 
laptop across the room."
        A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance 
company, 10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same 
damned e-mail kept coming back to me with a pesky notation 
claiming I needed to use a pronoun's possessive case before a 
gerund. With the number of e-mails I crank out each day, who has 
time for proper grammar? Whoever created this virus should have 
their programming fingers broken."
        A broker at Begg, Barow and Steel said he couldn't return to 
the "bad, old" days when he had to send paper memos in proper 
English. He speculated that the hacker who created Strunkenwhite 
was a "disgruntled English major who couldn't make it on a trading 
floor. When you're buying and selling on margin, I don't think it's 
anybody's business if I write that 'i meetinged through the morning, 
then cinched the deal on the cel phone while bareling down the 
xway.' "
        If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the 
end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant time 
saver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that 
e-mail increased employees' productivity by 1.8 hours a day because 
they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study 
also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they 
were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and 
stockbrokers.)
        Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it 
doesn't come as an e-mail attachment (which requires the recipient 
to open it before it becomes active). Instead, it is disguised within 
the text of an e-mail entitled "Congratulations on your pay raise." 
The message asks the recipient to "click here to find out about how 
your raise effects your pension." The use of "effects" rather than the 
grammatically correct "affects" appears to be an inside joke from 
Strunkenwhite's mischievous creator.
        The virus also has left government e-mail systems in disarray. 
Officials at the Office of Management and Budget can no longer 
transmit electronic versions of federal regulations because their 
highly technical language seems to run afoul of Strunkenwhite's 
dictum that "vigorous writing is concise." The White House speech 
writing office reported that it had received the same message, along 
with a caution to avoid phrases such as "the truth is... " and "in 
fact...."
        Home computer users also are reporting snafus, although an e-
mailer who used the word "snafu" said she had come to regret it.
        The virus can have an even more devastating impact if it infects 
an entire network. A cable news operation was forced to shut down 
its computer system for several hours when it discovered that 
Strunkenwhite had somehow infiltrated its TelePrompTer software, 
delaying newscasts and leaving news anchors nearly tongue-tied as 
they wrestled with proper sentence structure.
        There is concern among law enforcement officials that 
Strunkenwhite is a harbinger of the increasingly sophisticated 
methods hackers are using to exploit the vulnerability of business's 
reliance on computers. "This is one of the most complex and 
invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We 
just can't imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper 
with e-mails to create this burden on communications," said an FBI 
agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern 
that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for 
hours.
        Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers reported a surge 
in orders for Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style."