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A SCAM is sullying the hunt for alien intelligence. Someone is using a
computer virus to cheat in the SETI@home project, in which home PCs crunch data
from radio telescopes to look for signs of alien life.

With the SETI@home program installed, your PC sifts through a block of data
and returns the results to a processing centre. More than 3 million people have
signed up, and anyone who processes a lot of data may see their name posted on
the SETI@home Web page as 鈥淐runcher of the Week鈥�.

Now someone has written a virus that allows them to cheat. The virus spreads
to computers through Microsoft Outlook and shuts down antivirus software. It
downloads the SETI@home software and sets it up to perform work for the virus
writer鈥檚 account.

Eric Chien, chief researcher at the Internet security company Symantec鈥檚
European lab in the Netherlands, says the virus has only infected a handful of
computers. He adds that it would be easy for the people running distributed
computing projects such as SETI@home to spot the culprit and shut down their
account. 鈥淪omeone might be sending data for one account from millions of
machines all over the world,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 very unlikely to be
濒别驳颈迟颈尘补迟别.鈥�

David Anderson, director of SETI@home, says it would be possible to prevent
the virus working by adding a step to the installation process so that it cannot
be done remotely. 鈥淏ut this is harder than it sounds, and it would make life
difficult for people who legitimately install SETI@home on large numbers of
computers remotely,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think we鈥檒l do this.鈥�