New Virus carrying email

One of our members, Sharon K, has passed on warning about the following new threat.

VERY IMPORTANT WARNING
Please Be Extremely Careful especially if using internet mail such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and so on This information arrived this morning direct from both Microsoft and Norton.

Please send it to everybody you know who has access to the Internet.

You may receive an apparently harmless email with a Power Point presentation "Life is beautiful"

If you receive it DO NOT OPEN THE FILE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, and delete it immediately. If you open this file, a message will appear on your screen saying: "It is too late now, your life is no longer beautiful." Subsequently you will LOSE EVERYTHING IN YOUR PC and the person who sent it to you will gain access to your name, e-mail and password.

This is a new virus which started to circulate on Saturday afternoon. AOL has already confirmed the severity, and the antivirus software's are not capable of destroying it. The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself "life owner ."

PLEASE SEND A COPY OF THIS EMAIL TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS and ask them to PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY.

Julia

Sorry, Julia, but it's just a hoax.

Generally anything that says to send it on to everyone you know, and claims to wipe out everything on your hard disk or similar, is a hoax.

Always a good idea to do a quick search on it first, and if in doubt, just ignore it.

Cheers,
GP

GreatPig said:

Sorry, Julia, but it's just a hoax.

Generally anything that says to send it on to everyone you know, and claims to wipe out everything on your hard disk or similar, is a hoax.

Always a good idea to do a quick search on it first, and if in doubt, just ignore it.

Cheers,
GP

Click to expand...

Thanks, GP. Shows how gullible I am, doesn't it! I usually ignore anything which suggests it should be passed on, and vaguely thought it was odd that I'd had no notification from Norton, but my fear of viruses etc was sufficient to suck me in to this one.

Julia

Hey Guys,

Its funny being in this "IT" game. Family normally ring me up and say "blah blah my pc doesnt work anymore" response " If you dont tell me what you did prior to it failing i cannot help you". Now the reason i say this to people is because so many people just open crap up and download things from the net that they have no idea what it does.

After telling the same people many times it gets frustrating, i mean would you fill your car up from a fuel bowser that said "Not sure if this is fuel"? No, so why do you put your data at risk by doing stupid things?

Bottom line, If your unsure DELETE, if something says your computer is at risk and to click here DONT.

I think it is still good practice to notify friends like Julia has done, but ultimately take responsibillity for your own data. In my view there is no excuse for losing it, if its important back it up. If you constantly have these problems then you need to educate yourself.

Any non IT members i would be happy to give you some basic tools and practices i use to keep my data safe.

Regards Stink