A BRITISH software company has found the first virus specifically designed to infect Microsoft Corp's Windows 95 operating system.

The virus, called Boza, corrupts programmes so they no longer work properly. It occasionally throws up a message reading "The taste of fame just got tastier. VLAD Australia does it again with the world's first Win95 virus."

"It's the first that we've seen that affects Windows 95 programmes in particular," Mr Paul Ducklin, an analyst for Abingdon, England based software company Sophos. Computer viruses spread when a user inserts an infected disk, or downloads infected programmes over a telephone connection.