Topanga

VIRUS ALERT Institute for Computing Standards
Portland, Oregon
The Institute for Computing Standards has issued a warning
concerning a newly discovered virus: the TOPANGA virus. The first
known virus of its kind, Topanga is capable of affecting electronic
appliances which share circuits with infected computers. The virus
can manipulate a computer's power supply through the hard drive
power connection, causing the power supply to generate back-EMF
cotangential sine waves over the computer's 120VAC circuit. These
electrical anomalies have been designed to interfere with other
electronic appliances which share a circuit with the host PC,
including not only computer peripherals such as monitors, modems and
printers, but also digital clocks, stereo equipment, cordless
telephones, microwaves, coffee makers, etc. Topanga can overload
and burn out circuit boards on appliances; affected boards are then
useless, and can be costly to replace, so take caution. Appliances
appear to malfunction briefly, and then will frequently emit sparks
and then cease functioning. Although no electrical fires have been
attributed directly to topanga, this is a danger.

The Topanga virus spreads itself surreptitiously through TCP
connections made during hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)
"server push" browsing. Server push is a feature in ANSI HTML
versions 2.0 and higher; it allows a web server to notify the client
browser when a new page or new data is available. Topanga generally
replicates itself using TCP port 80 over the Internet, although an
infected http daemon (web server) can also infect intranet computers
as well. During transmission of the virus, the host web browser
typically experiences a delay of several seconds while downloading a
document during "server push" operations (web page redirect, for
example).

System adminstrators can check their web servers for existence of
the virus by searching for the file "topanga" within their web
server document directories. End users should ensure that they are
running the latest version of their virus protection software; major
anti-virus packages have already included topanga virus definitions
in the latest release of their software.

End users who suspect that their computers may be infected with
topanga should immediately either A) unplug all appliances which
share a circuit with their computers, or B) turn off their
computers, until they install the latest version of virus protection
software (which must specifically state that it offers protection
from the "TOPANGA" virus). After the computer is verified to be
free of topanga, appliances may be plugged back in.