Kaspersky Lab, an international data-security software
developer, reports the detection of the "Donut" virus, which is
the first malicious program to infect .NET files. "Donut" has
been developed by the notorious Czech hacker going by the
pseudonym "Benny", who is a part of the "29A" virus-writers
group. "Benny" is known to be the author of many proof-of-
concept viruses among which are "Stream" (the first NTFS
alternate data streams infector), "Inta" (the first Windows 2000
virus), "HIV", "Champ", "Eva", "Begemot", etc. The most
intriguing aspect about this virus is that the .NET technology,
which Microsoft presents as the future substitute for Java, has
not yet been officially released and intrinsically is still
under development. "It is well-known that virus writers are
primarily interested in the most popular and wide-spread
software products, which nowadays are undoubtedly the Microsoft
technologies. The appearance of 'Donut' confirms the opinion
that the company's products are guaranteed to be popular no