Virus Alerts

[Garth]

boys' and girls, i got a bug sent to me, and well i have coped it sweet.

the problem im having is the following

it's a email worm, if anyone receives anything from the following addy's with attatchments, remove it straight away, delete it

gpschapman@bigpond.com
gpchapman@bigpond.com
amonkeystolemynuts@hotmail.com

while i have done everything i can to sort it out, it will eventualy get away from my pc

it is also affecting my chat, so no chat for me

virus name is as followes

macro_ele.e keep yr eye's out for it guy's and girls, it comes threw as a word doc or a zip file, for winrar or winzip

if you get it, im sorry, i have got it contained here on my pc, but please dont open anything from the above addy's, just delete it and let me know

cheers
garth

[Darren]

In addition to what Garth has written above I really can't stress enough how important it is to make use of a virus application. Working in the IT industry the amount of people I come across which open emails nilly willy are simply asking for trouble.

Some ways you can minimise infections to your computer or network are as follows:If you receive something through email which has an obscure subject or text in the message body delete it. On the otherhand to that if you don’t know who the sender is delete it rather than running the attachment.Don't open anything which you are unsure of what it might contain.Just because your provider has email protection doesn't mean it's 100% effective, always run your own virus protection for safety's sake.Ensure Windows is completely up to date by this I mean ensure all the critical updates are installed.Use of a software firewall can be beneficial even if you are using a router of some description whether it’s a hardware device or a dedicated gateway/router such as linux. Viruses such as the blaster use ports 137 - 139 to send out information, simply by blocking these ports in your firewall rules can help minimise damage such as that ugly shutdown in 30 seconds box which appears when you are infected with the blaster worm.
I use and highly recommend Norton Antivirus which does cost money well for the less resourceful people but on the free end of the scale AVG seems to be the go which is available from grisoft.com.

I have heard of instances where viruses have been completely missed by virus scanners even Norton's so be very careful and if possible scan your PC's once a week or more if you keep sensitive data on your PC and at this stage update your virus defs regularly meaning once every couple of days just to make sure you are running the latest defs.

I am a qualified computer technician and have been playing with computers since I was 4 so if you come across any problems I'd be more than happy to help out any member who needs some help removing a virus.

If you know what the virus is a great resource is the Symantec web site. Simply punch in the name of the virus and hit search, from there you can select the closest match and obtain easy to follow removal instructions.