Kaspersky Lab, the world leader in antivirus protection, announced discovery of the world's first virus which is capable of infecting Corel Draw files. Thus the popular graphic package has fallen another victim of harmful "warez". The virus was named "CS.Gala".

The possibility for a virus to thrive on Corel Draw files arises from the fact that Corel Draw, like a number of other powerful software solutions, supports a scripting language to extend its functionality. Scripts are used to tune Corel Draw for specific tasks, which are cannot be satisfied by standard capabilities of the program. Corel Draw scripting language has much in common with Visual Basic, used in Microsoft Office. It supports a number of functions, including file operations. Thus, Corel Draw scripts allow to look for files, read them, write into them, search for specific data - e.g., to perform virtually every operation needed to construct a virus.

Once an infected file is launched, the virus looks for other Corel Draw scripts in the current directory and infects the first "clean" of them. (These files have extension ".CSC".) While doing this, a temporary file MALLORN.TMP is created. The virus can be easily seen with the naked eye. The beginning and the end of the virus body in an infected script is marked by the following comments:

REM ViRUS GaLaDRieL FOR COREL SCRIPT bY zAxOn/DDT REM END OF ViRUS GaLaDRieL bY zAxOn/DDT

CS.Gala reveals itself on June 6 every year by displaying a corresponding message. It does not possess any dectructive abilities.

Experts from Kaspersky Lab say that the possibility of wide propagation of the virus is rather small since there is only a negligible number of Corel Draw users who actually apply scripts, and only a small fraction of them does exchange script files. However, the appearance of viruses which are able to exist in another type of data is worthing attention by itself.

Source: InfoArt News Agency

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