Hype may have minimized worm’s damage

Companies and individuals heeded this week’s warning — some may call it “hype” — about a file-destroying computer worm known as “Kama Sutra,” helping minimize its damage Friday, security experts said.

One Italian city shut down its computers as a precaution, but otherwise the worm’s trigger date arrived with relatively few reports of problems.

For days, experts warned that the worm could corrupt documents using the most common file types, including “.doc,” “.pdf,” and “.zip.” It affects most versions of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system, prompting the software giant to issue a warning Tuesday.

Hundreds of thousands of computers were believed to be infected, but security vendors say many companies and individuals had time to clean up their machines following the alarm, carried by scores of media outlets.

“Certainly, right now, we and our anti-virus partners are not seeing a widespread impact of this attack,” said Stephen Toulouse, a Microsoft security manager.

For Milan, Italy, though, the discovery came too late. Technicians switched off 10,000 city government computers after discovering the infection Thursday and deciding they didn’t have enough time to clean the machines.

“It has spread to all our computers,” said Giancarlo Martella, Milan’s councilman for technological innovation and public services. “Knowing how destructive it is, we turned off all personal computers to avoid losing our data.”

Unlike other worms generally designed to help spammers and hackers carry out attacks, Kama Sutra sets out to destroy documents by overwriting data.