Swedish courts catch Homepage worm

The Homepage computer worm has crippled the email system supporting Sweden's courts, temporarily crippling the country's legal system.

Roughly 7,000 email accounts within Sweden's legal framework were affected by the worm, which was unleashed earlier this week and targets Microsoft Outlook users.

The worm, which is based on the same code as the Kournikova worm, forwards itself on to everyone in a victim's address book and automatically opens a pornographic Web page on its host machine. The Homepage worm does not damage an infected computer system but can clog up corporate mail systems because of the volume of mail it generates.

A spokeswoman for Sweden's judiciary confirmed this morning that the worm had infected almost all of the legal system's machines but could not say how much this has impacted upon the legal process.

Computer virus experts say that the Homepage worm was generated with the same virus toolkit used to create the Kournikova worm and some have called for companies to block Visual Basic Script (VBS) attachments by default.

Despite making a quick start and affecting many corporate networks, however, the worm died out after just 24 hours.

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