The Bugbear worm, which resurfaced this week after initially infecting computers last October, on Thursday shut the e-mail system at Stanford University for nine hours, the university said on Friday. Stanford said it disabled all outgoing e-mail on Thursday due to a large volume of messages infected with the Bugbear.B virus. The worm targets personal computers, and is automatically activated on Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer as soon as the e-mail is read, even if the attachment is not open. It said some of the infected messages contained personal and confidential information from other e-mails. Stanford, based in Stanford, California, about 40 miles south of San Francisco in the heart of Silicon Valley, is renowned for its computer science and engineering programs, which have produced the founders of some of the region's most prominent high-tech companies. The university said it decided to disable its e-mail to avoid sending out compromising or confidential information contained in some infected messages. The e-mail service was restored by Thursday evening. News source: Reuters Norton Antivirus synopsis: W32.Bugbear.B@mm is a mass-mailing, polymorphic worm that also spreads through network shares. This worm infects a select list of executable files, has keystroke-logging and backdoor capabilities and will attempt to terminate the processes of various antivirus and firewall programs. Links to popular antivirus software web sites: -> Symantec Norton Antivirus -> McAfee Antivirus -> Antivirus Panda Software