Just a quick warning for people to be on the look out for the bugbear virus.

For most of this this will not be a problem - we either don't use outlook or we have a good virus scanner (this should be mandatory).

However even then software can be vulnerable. Recently I experienced a case of the bugbear virus on a standalone I was working on. I received an email titled 'greets' and as soon as I opened the email the virus was activated. It didn't require me to open an attachment. Just opening the email was sufficient to activate the virus.

The curious thing was that at the time there was a tsr-resident virus scanner running and it didn't pick up the virus, either immediately or on a scan.

At home I run an anti-virus program called AVT which is very effective. It is a tsr-resident scanner and does pick up the bugbear virus. I recommend it highly (no I don't have shares in the company). I received the bugbear virus today and the scanner killed it off immediately.

This is a particularly nasty virus in that it can copy keystrokes and give a hacker access to those keystrokes eg you might have typed your credit card number.

Full details are available on the following link. The page also includes a small program put out by sophos to clean your system of the virus. It would be worth downloading it and checking as your virus scanner may not have picked up the virus.
Click Here

I might add that the above virus has been spreading very rapidly over the past few days.

cheers Peter

However, according to the SARC write-up, the viral code cannot be executed other than by running the attachment. But the fact that I've had so many of them suggests to me that this one is somehow managing to run itself without the user needing to do anything. In Microsoft Outlook (which I use for email at work), I get a box saying 'do you want to open the attachment or save it to disc?' whenever I open an infected email. This message appears even if I don't click on the attachment. At home, Norton picks up the infected emails before they're downloaded, so I haven't seen how Eudora would react.

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Samual Hunter Sr.

Other than that, no problems.

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From my experiences over the past few days I'd say that this virus is spreading like wildfire.

Check out the following
Media Article 1
Media Article 2
Media Article 3
Media Article 4

I might add that the rating of the seriousness of the virus has been upgraded for the second time. Believe me - it's nasty.

If it continues at this rate can you imagine how many infected emails we will be receiving per day by the end of this week? At one stage I got up to about 7 Klez emails a day. This could surpass that.

cheers Peter

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Samual Hunter Sr.

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Of course I also run antiviral software on my machines.

If you use Outlook/Outlook Express, be sure to disable the preview pane so the self executing viruses like Bad Trans don't infect your computer.

I use Poco Mail because I don't trust Outlook or Outlook Express. Poco mail lets you preview your headers on the server with out downloading. Anything that looks suspicious or spam gets deleted directly off the server. My main POP3 account got bomb with the Klez virus this summer and this feature really came in handy.

If you do download something accidently (like Bad Trans) it won't self execute like it does with Outlook/Outlook Express.

I didn't edit it out of there. Not yet, anyway.

OK.......well, I wonder what might have also been inserted in the registry....

This must be a new one - as I have not found anything on McAfee that talks aboout rape.exe - has anyone ever heard of it?