[CI-Announce] A word about worms...

[Mugsy Lunsford]

Hello fellow dancers,

While watching the incoming email over the last few days, I'm seeing 
many, many emails carrying the SOBIG F virus, easy to spot since they 
each have an attachment called something like:
wicked.scr.pif, document 9422.doc.pif, details.pif, application.doc.pif
... although you may not be seeing the .pif suffix on your computer. 
These don't adversely affect my Mac, but are annoyingly tedious to 
download, so I feel sorry for anyone on dialup.

I noticed that a lot of the virally-generated email has an assortment 
of old email addresses from the dance community, and realized that 
they may be from one of the East Coast Jam lists that have been sent 
out over the last few years to every attendee. This virus sends 
itself out in emails with "spoofed" sender addresses, which it picks 
up from any files, anywhere on the infected computer.

Just in case you attended the Jam and have a copy of any of those 
lists on a computer running Windows, please take a moment to check 
your antivirus software, update the virus definitions, and then run a 
scan over your disks.

If you don't have an antivirus application installed, you can scan 
your drives for free here: <http://www.ravantivirus.com/> Just click 
on 'scan online' on the lefthand side, and then either sign up for 
the notification service, or just go ahead and take advantage of the 
free online scan.

If you'd like to get a serious, powerful and easy to use antivirus 
application to protect your system, consider subscribing to the full 
version of the RAV software mentioned above, or look at F-Secure 
<http://www.f-secure.com/index.shtml>

If this week o'viruses has brought you down, read about the Welchi 
worm, which kills off the Lovsan A. virus, installs the Microsoft 
patch that keeps that virus from spreading, and then dies off itself. 
A well-crafted anti-virus-virus, with curious embedded messages, but 
read the report: 
<http://www.f-secure.com/news/items/news_2003081900.shtml>

breathe in, breathe out

-- 
   Mugsy

<http://www.macgeekofdogtown.com>
Don't make me use uppercase.