computer virus in space

San Francisco - Scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were busy Wednesday fighting a computer virus that managed to infect one of the laptop computers used by astronauts on the space station, a spokesman for the US space agency said.

Citing security concerns, NASA declined to identify the virus, or how it made its way to the space station.

But the space news site SpaceRef.com, which first reported the infection, identified the virus as 'W32.Gammima.AG'. Referring to NASA's daily status reports, the site said the virus was probably transmitted on a flash disk drive which somehow had not been scanned.

The malware is a year-old Windows worm designed to steal information from players of 10 different online games, some of them specific to the Chinese market. Among the games are ZhengTu, HuangYi Online and Rohan.

NASA said that new antivirus programs had been installed on the station's computers and that the worm posed no threat. 'It was never a threat to any command-and-control or operations computer,' NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries told Computerworld magazine.