The following has been derived from information provided by Norman Data Defense.

At this time, this variant has not been found in the wild, and is expected to have a limited spread potential due to compatibility issues.

Virus Characteristics

UNIX/LoveLetter.A is a variant of the VBS/LoveLetter.A virus ported to the UNIX environment.

The virus uses a so-called shell script which will email itself to all addresses found in the files ".muttrc" and ".mailrc", as well as user names picked from the local password file etc/passwd. The virus uses the UNIX standard mail program mailx to do this. The e-mail consists of the following:

Subject line: I LOVE YOU
Body text: (none)
Attachment name: Loveletter.sh

This virus is also started at every login, as the virus file name is inserted into the Bourne Again Shell startup file ".bashrc".

Payload

The payload for this variant is as destructive as the original VBS.LoveLetter. The virus will attempt to delete all files with the following extensions:

JPG, JPEG, MPG, GIF

The virus will not overwrite them as the original virus did.