A New Jersey Man Is Arrested And Charged as Melissa_s Creator.

A man has been arrested and charged with originating the e-mail virus known as Melissa, the New Jersey attorney general_s office announced Friday. David L. Smith, 30, of Aberdeen, was arrested Thursday night. Mr. Smith originated the virus, which caused worldwide e-mail disruption earlier this week, from his apartment in Aberdeen.Ms. Mr. Smith was snared with the help of America Online Inc. technicians and a computer task force composed of federal and state agents. No information was immediately available as to what charges Mr. Smith faces.The Melissa virus spread around the world last Friday and over the weekend, apparently having been uploaded to the Internet newsgroup alt.sex from a stolen America Online account. It affected personal computers that have Microsoft Corp._s Word software and its mail programs, Outlook or Outlook Express. Once activated by unwary users, the virus causes each PC to tap into the mail program_s address list and send 50 copies of a message containing a list of pornographic Web sites to e-mail addresses on that list, generating a flood of traffic that brought many corporate e-mail systems to a halt last Friday. The virus crafted a subject line for the e-mail that begins with "Important message from" followed by the name of the person who unwittingly passed on the message. The virus isn_t activated unless users call up a Word file, named "list.doc," that is attached to the mail message. A global hunt for the programmer responsible began soon after the virus began winging its way around the world. Computer researchers were soon hard at work tracing Melissa_s path and poring over the style of coding used by its author. Some of the earliest evidence in the hunt, ironically, came from an identification number generated by some versions of Word -- a feature that was the subject of harsh scrutiny from privacy advocates after its existence was brought to light last month.The identification numbers, called global unique identifiers (GUID), are generated by Word 97 and associated with specific documents. Though only one number is generated for each data file or Word document, sometimes virus creators work from someone else_s file rather than creating a new one. It is also possible for clever programmers to change a GUID to cast suspicion on a machine other than their own.There is ample reason for virus authors to cloak their identity: Knowingly transmitting a computer virus is a federal crime punishable by as much as 10 years in prison, depending on the amount of damage created.