ASCII Corp has been hit by the embarrassment of a virus in one of its products: it has had to withdraw copies of a utility for use with MS-DOS running on NEC Corp PC-9801 personal computers and has distributed vaccine programs to thousands of customers that have already bought the software; known as Cascade, the virus can transfer itself to other programs and attack data stored on a computer’s hard disk; ASCII had shipped 7,000 copies since marketing began a month ago, and up to 3,000 of these have been sold, but it has heard of no case of damage caused by the virus.
