WARNING New Virus Alert

I know this is not pet related but thought i would share...

urgent guys just neard of a new virus
if you receive and email with the subject as (invitation) even if it is from someone you know do not (DO NOT)
open it even if you know the sender it will do the following
open up a picture of the olympic flame
it will then start the flame flickering
which will then burn a hole in your 'c' drive and thats it no recovery guys

dont get caught out DONT OPEN IT


Mike

 

Thanks Mike,

Ive had a few virus problems in the past from this kind of thing and Ive got to the point now where its very rare that I open an attachment from anyone unless its something that Im expecting...like photos or a link Ive asked about.

While were on the subject though, theres another forum (a very slow one) that Im admin at and we recently had a 'wave' of ads posted there, some of them had about 200 ads in them, really annoying, I was just deleting them as they came in but then someone I know was having the same ones come up and it turned out that many of the ads in there had viruses in them.

Thanks again for the warning.

 

So as long as I don't open the attachment I'm fine? I get lots of spam, etc. and I never open the attachments or click the links or anything, but I have Outlook Express which sort of automatically opens the email part of it.

 

I use outlook express too, it opens the mails but not attachments, as far as I know you have to actually open an attachment to allow a virus or worm or something in. Do you have a virus scan? Ive been using AVG which is a free on line virus scan and it updates regularly plus you can set it to a set time to run each day, kinda cool, if it catches a virus you get this pic that comes up with a vault and message that says the virus is in the vault.

 

This is not true. If you are allowing OE to view emails as HTML you can be infected by just viewing emails. Most people use the prieview pane function as well and that is just the same as opening an email. Not all virii are attachments some are embeded scripts within the HTML email that run in the background.
I deal with this sort of problem every day as it is my job at a ski resort.
I set all email clients to restricted security and read email as plain text. I have also disabled the reading pane (pain really) in most of the user machines.
A good full time Antivirus/Antimalware scanner and good paranoia practices are your best defense.

Also I have never found a virus that can not be removed from a system and there was only one so far that ever did what is known as hardware type damage. The CIH virus attacked the BIOS programming causing you to have to replace or reflash the BIOS chip.

BTW charmedagain,
I sure would like to know the name of this virus and where you heard about it from. I have done a search for new threats and there are none that do as you have described and www.sarc.com says there are no severe threats at this time. And the new stuff is only at low threat level.

 

Thanks Mike...I will be having 'serious words' with the so called expert that told me OE was safe for all e-mails and the thing about the attachments. :x

 

If the attachment is the payload then you are safe not to open it. If the payload is in the HTML then you will be under threat. I use Outlook 2003 and it is not even safe because if you read HTML you may get hit. Both OE and Outlook have settings that can prevent the opening of potentially harmful attachments but it is not foolproof and not to be relied upon. Good antivirus protection is a must. IT professionals are now leaning to full featured Anti-Malware now. Like Ewido. http://www.ewido.net/en/
I use it to remove severe infections from co-workers machines all the time.

I am considering switching to Thunderbird for email myself.
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

 

Ill look into that. Are you using Mozilla all the time? I started using it a few months back but there were some sites that I go into that I couldnt access through it (I think it might have been a couple of forums).

 

Turns out this virus threat is a hoax.

I am sorry if this caused any panic to anyone, All i was asked was to pass it along to everyone i knew, As my friends brother and some friends got the virus so i took it at face value, It will teach me not to do that again....

Again sorry for any panic.

Mike

 

I use FireFox all the time. I have Adblock and NoScript enabled and can access almost any site with it. There are a couple of MS sites that require IE but with IE View enabled I can set FireFox to always open that site in IE.

Mike,
Don't worry about it. Better to be on alert then to stick your head in the sand and expect everything to be cool.

 

Dont worry, it happens, my sister one time sent an e-mail to everyone in her address book (about 50 people) to tell them that she had got a virus that got into her address book and was destroying all those people computers....it was a hoax but shed only just got her first computer...she was in tears when I phoned her to tell her it was a hoax, she thought shed cost all her freinds and relatives thousands of dollars worth of comuter damage.