NOT SO CUTE: The Panda, a computer infection that wreaked havoc among computers in China

The cute and cuddly panda, a national treasure of China, took on a new and ugly persona recently. The Panda virus, which appears on computers as a panda holding three joss sticks, first appeared in December last year and has since infected millions of computers worldwide.

As many computer users have found, the virus can be extremely destructive and difficult to get rid of. Ms. Guo, an office worker in Beijing, found her laptop was infected on February 24, and took it to have the computer's operating system reinstalled. A few days later another one of her computers fell victim to the virus. This time the reinstallation failed to clean up the infection. Days after the reinstallation various functions of the computer were still in disorder and it could not shut down.

Guo sought help from a computer expert, who spent an entire afternoon reinstalling the computer's system and planting anti-virus software. But two days later, when Guo transferred mp3 songs from a removable memory stick to the computer, a mutation of the Panda virus invaded again. In a few minutes 200 files were infected and the computer had to be reinstalled a third time.

The problems did not end there. At work Guo found that the virus was lurking in the computer system, and all of the computers had to be reinstalled.

The Panda virus outbreak has been costly and aggravating for PC users and companies. "The virus has damaged order information and caused a loss of tens of thousands of yuan to my company," said one netizen on an Internet forum.

The virus has become a hot topic among anti-virus fighters, who described it as an infection "without any cutting-edge high-technology but that has integrated the essences of many popular viruses such as the Trojan horse virus." The Panda virus can wreak havoc among personal and corporate computers, deleting files, damaging programs, attacking Web portals and stealing account names, they said.

Jiangmin New Section Technology Ltd. is the nation's largest information security technology developer and service provider. But its anti-virus software targeting the Panda can only kill the virus on personal computers. It cannot be removed from the Internet because the source code cannot be deleted, according to Wang Hao, an anti-virus expert with Shanghai Computer Virus Prevention Service Center.

According to Jiangmin, the virus has affected government bodies including those in charge of finance, taxation and energy.

"The virus has three major ways to spread: local area network (LAN), Web portals and removable memory devices," said Shi Yu, an anti-virus engineer at Rising, a virus protection company in Beijing.

According to an anti-virus expert at the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, the Panda virus takes advantage of old computer system loopholes. If computer users install basic anti-virus software, they will be better protected.