By A Western Practitioner

At present Dafa practitioners, particularly those who are coodinators and contact persons, are under threat of a targeted email virus attack.

The virus, which takes advantage of the Windows image file vulnerability, has already been directed at Dafa contact persons in the US, and perhaps in other areas. The problem was announced by Microsoft on Dec. 27, and by Dec. 30, Dafa contact persons began to recieve a new round of email viruses with infected images as attachments. There was no alert system in place to warn practitioners of this threat. This virus is not detected by anti-virus software.

Last spring, a round of email viruses was directed at Dafa practitioners. At that time, though our computer experts knew that the virus infected computers, they were uncertain about the activity of the virus. As the recipient of one of those viruses, which was hidden in a Microsoft Word macro, I now know that this was what is called a rootkit virus.

This rootkit virus would have gone undetected had I been using Microsoft Internet Explorer, as my antivirus software did not detect it. The virus operates much like spyware, by opening a "backdoor" and sending information or data over the internet connection, and also replaces many of the operating system files so that the computer may be controlled remotely or by software commands.

It is possible that this stealth program is operating today on a number of practitioners' computers, sending information back to China, unknown to the practitioner. Anti-virus software may detect the delivery system, but once it is in place, it cannot be detected by the anti-virus software. Special rootkit detection software is necessary to detect the presence of these threats.

Because of the past and potential losses to our practitioners, it seems that we might give some thought to the formation of an alert system, and a resource system to inform practitioners about the security threats. Possibly it is time to begin collecting cases of virus (and telephone) attacks so that we have a ready resource for truth clarification activities and lawsuits.