Microsoft accidentally sent the virulent Nimda worm to South Korean developers when it distributed Korean-language versions of Visual Studio .Net that carried the virus, the company acknowledged Friday. Microsoft's flagship developer tools picked up the digital pest when a third-party company translated the program into Korean, said Christopher Flores, lead product manager for Visual Studio .Net. Flores stressed that no other foreign-language versions of the program were found to carry the worm, and he said the worm had not actually executed on any developers' systems. "There have been no recorded infections," Flores said. In fact, he added, it's almost impossible to get the worm to execute on computers with Visual Studio .Net installed. The infected file is stored in the same location as the help files, Flores said, but it's a file created by Nimda, so the .Net program's help system doesn't know it's there and will never reference--or open--the file. It's unlikely, then, that Nimda would break loose, Flores said.
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