[Fwd: New virus!!!]

[Robert DeLossa]

Sounds like a hoax. Nothing at Dr. Solomon's Virus Central about it or
anything at Microsoft. If anyone has other info, please correct me. The
part about not looking at returned mail is what looks especially fishy.

As a reminder, it is the case that you are susceptible to certain viruses
just by reading mail *only* if you use certain older versions of Netscape
or Microsoft IE as your mail client (because of a flaw that was discovered
this summer). If you use them for mail, you should update to the latest
versions. For all others (Pine, Pegasus, Eudora, etc.), reading mail should
not expose you to infection. *However*, if you open attachments that come
with your mail, run .exe programs that come in, etc., then you *are* open
to any virus imbedded in them (macro viruses in Word docs, trojan horses in
.exes, etc.). You should always have everything that comes in with your
mail scanned with an updated anti-virus program (it's the one thing not to
cheap out on). There is a lot of viral garbage coming in from Eastern
Europe these days, so we, as a community, are especially susceptible.

I think as a rule it would help SEELANGS if people would try to
independently verify virus alerts before posting to the listserv. I serve
as a networking/IT coordinator here and have found that most alerts these
days are hoaxes, wasting a lot of our time. I very much appreciate the
impulse to inform, but it would be better for the one well-meaning sender
to verify the report than having hundreds of recipients scrambling to do
the same.


Robert DeLossa

____________________________________________________
Robert DeLossa
Director of Publications
Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
1583 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-496-8768; fax. 617-495-8097
reply to: rdelossa at fas.harvard.edu
http://www.sabre.org/huri