Tuesday, February 29 9:59 PM SGT

Sophos Advises On Leap Year Bug Problems

LONDON, ENGLAND, 2000 FEB 29 (NB) -- By Steve Gold, Newsbytes. Just when you though the Y2K date change problem had faced away, IT security firms are now warning that some computer systems could fall over today because of the Feb. 29 date change issue.

Preliminary news reports from around the globe indicate, however, that besides some minor ATM shutdowns in Japan and other localized problems, there is little action afoot.

UK-based IT security firm Sophos said that industry concerns that software will not correctly recognize Feb. 29, 2000 as legitimate, are valid.

Graham Cluley, the firm's senior technology consultant, said that predictions of millions of computers crashing on Feb. 29 are probably overhyped.

"Computers go wrong every day of the year - there is no reason to believe the leap day will be a significant problem for most computer users," he said.

According to Cluley, work that IT managers performed during the run-up to Y2K gave them an opportunity to confirm that their software applied the leap year rule correctly.

"As far as viruses are concerned, there is no greater risk of being infected on Feb. 29 than any other day of the year," he said.

Sophos said it has also issued an advisory on a Feb. 29 hoax, now circulating on the Internet. The hoax, called "How to deep fry a cat," said that spreadsheet files on hard disks will be "eaten" by a virus on the last day of February 2000.

Sophos has published more information on the hoax on its Web site at http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/scares/pbr.html .

Link for this story: http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/technology/article.html?s=asia/headlines/000229/technology/newsbytes/Sophos_Advises_On_Leap_Year_Bug_Problems.html

-- Jen Bunker (jen@bunkergroup.com), February 29, 2000