I know, I know... It ain't motoring, but HJ and Mart have both been hit recently...
A POWERFUL new computer virus was tonight causing havoc with email systems across the world.
Experts described the virus, called Goner, as one of the fastest-spreading they had seen and warned computer users to immediately delete it. Alex Shipp, spokesman for anti-virus service MessageLabs, said: "It's spreading with tremendous speed and thousands of users in Britain have already been sent it.
"The virus mass mails itself out through email and attempts to destroy anti-virus software on computers, which could prove extremely problematic for those unfortunate enough to receive it."
The infected e-mail has the word "Hi" as its subject and body text which reads "When I saw this screen saver, I immediately thought about you. I am in a harry (sic), I promise you will love it." Its attachment is labelled "gone.scr."
It was first detected this morning in America but experts believe it was created in Europe. The US, the UK and France are the worst hit of the 17 countries affected so far.
www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne...l
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Ian is right to warn us of this. The damage to you system is far greater than with BADTRANS. The first thing this one does is to delete loads of Norton AV files!
Advise (as I've just done) you all do a live update of your AV programs.
David
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Too late. I got one of these at work. It came from a colleague who often sends me amusing stuff by e-mail. I virus checked it and it appeared clean so I tried to open it. Oops. Perhaps I will still have a job tomorrow.
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Fortunately our work server has a really good virus checker on it ...
But in the last 1/2 hour, I've had about 30 poxy virussed emails ... the far-east has just got hit, judging by the addresses!
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I ran the online update for Norton Virus Definitions, but it said mine was up do date (from yesterday), so this must be a PC thing, not affecting Macs (?).
You PC guys seem to be having a fun time with the virus funsters at the mo, no doubt they'll let us Mac users in on the hilarious joke soon enough. What a waste of talent.
Stu.
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Anyone using Outlook Express should go to 'View' and set it so you don't get a split screen view of the incoming e-mail. Then you have to double-click the incoming e-mail to view it. But by single clicking you can select it to be deleted and delete any incoming e-mail with an attachment. If you don't do this, future viruses could work like BADTRANS and automatically download from the attachment as soon as you select them.
HJ
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