Learn how to cure your workstation of the "AutoCAD virus".

Several Autodesk and CAD blogs are reporting that there is a virus striking AutoCAD users. We first heard about this annoying little development while reading Shaan Hurley’s blog Between the Lines. It seems that like so many virus attacks this is actually a reprisal of an older virus that first appeared in 2005. In fact it seems that it is a variant of a virus called ALS.Bursted or ALS.Bursted.A which McAfee reports a discovery date of 2003. It seems that it’s true, the internet never forgets.

Autodesk's AutoCAD 2010 ...

 This round of infections seems to center around the ACAD.VLX file but previous attacks have also used .LSP and .FAS files as delivery methods. Users are reporting that the malicious .VLX file corrupts drawing when opened and, in some cases, writes random strings of text to the drawing file. Fortunately Autodesk is aware of this problem and has issued a solution for this problem. Be sure to visit the Support Page and follow the directions to inject the code to remove the virus. Get it? Inject ... virus. We crack ourselves up!

We’d like to thank Mr. Hurley for being one of the many Autodesk blogs bringing this information to users’ attention. Unfortunately there will always be a large segment of CAD professionals who do not stay up-to-date on current events, updates and news regarding their CAD applications. This virus is a prime example of how an ounce of free information can save a ton of aggravation ...

- KFD -