Virus ate my bagels

I spent a very frustrating day at work yesterday, cleaning someone's computer of the Bagle-CL virus. I had the same frustrating experience a week ago, cleaning my own computer at work.

What, you say, you don't have an enterprise anti-virus system? Yes, we do, but it turns out that the company involved stopped supporting the program a few years ago. I have been downloading upgrades religiously every week and was sure that we were covered, but when I approached the technical support, I received a very off-hand answer "yes, we know this virus but what do you expect when you're using an unsupported program?". I have improved the English a bit as it was less grammatical and more callous, although that may have been the result of the writer not knowing English well.

Fortunately I have the source discs for CA's E-trust program which runs on one of our servers, so I was able to install this product on my computer and get rid of the virus. I wasn't so lucky yesterday; the virus had managed to take a very firm grip on the computer, and I could neither install the antivirus program nor run an internet-based antivirus program. Eventually I found a program from Trend Micro which I could download to one computer; I burnt the program and data file to a cd and then ran this program on the infected computer. After three runs, it seemed that all the infected files had been cleaned (although I had to manually delete one file in safe mode); after that I was able to install the CA program and verify that the computer was indeed clean.

I am still waiting for a service representative to help me install the CA program on our main - and unprotected - server.

All the above causes me to wonder what sort of misanthrope would write such a virulent virus. I'm not too sure what actual damage the virus was meant to do (in terms of destroying program or data files), but it wasted several man-hours and annoyed me (muttering "it's not personal, it's business" under my breath).

Incidentally, does anyone know why this class of virus is called 'Bagle'? As far as I know, there's no such word, unless it's a misspelling of 'bagel' or even 'beagle'.