Virus Alert

[9erRed]

Summary:
W32.Bugbear@mm is a highly distributed mass-mailing worm that can infect any PC running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Me. It can also spread through shared network connections, and will attempt to connect to any available network resource.

Full Information:
"Bugbear" attempts to propigate itself by sending mass mail messages to addresses harvested from a compromised PC's address book. The worm will also attempt to terminate the processes of various antivirus and firewall programs, thereby making unauthorized access to compromised machines possible.

This worm is distributed via email, the subject line of which may read "bad news", "membership information", "your gift", or others. The worm's file extensions may also vary, with double extensions ending in .exe, .scr, or .pif. The attachment size will be about 50,688 bytes. As with all suspicious email messages, we advise you not to open the attachment if you are not sure what it is.

"Bugbear" does not appear to infect systems running Unix, Linux, or any Macintosh OS.

For more information, please visit the Symantec Security Response website.

Be alert - Be safe ...... 9erRed

[Ssnake]

What the message SHOULD say is that it uses not "addresses harvested from a compromised PC's address book", but "addresses harvested from a compromised PC's Outlook/Outlook Express address book".

Get Pegasus Mail (http://www.pmail.com). It's free. Its look and feel (version 4.x and later) is similar to Outlook, but without the integrated virus distribution features of O/OE. Outlook is the virus.

[Chaplain]

If you are on a corporate e-mail system, you could try to convince your IT department to adopt Lotus Notes. It is almost impervious to viruses.

Of course, it has its own set of headaches. :casstet:

(Cool - I have wanted to use that smiley since we switched over.)