Virus Warning!!! — Oh yeah?

Important news

This information arrived this morning, from Microsoft and Norton.

Please send it to everybody you know who accesses the Internet. You may receive an apparently harmless email with a PowerPoint presentation called: "Life is beautiful.pps."

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, email and password.

This is a new virus which started to circulate on Saturday afternoon.

The antivirus Softs are not capable of destroying it.

The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself "life owner", and who aims to destroying domestic PCs and who also fights Microsoft in court! That's why it comes disguised with extension pps. He fights in court for the Windows-XP patent.

MAKE A COPY OF THIS EMAIL TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

Dear Friend,

Thank you for your concern, but as someone who has worked in the field, I can tell you that the first rule upon receiving any email message, ever, that says, "SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW" or "SEND TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS" is to throw the message away immediately, preferably without reading it.

Especially if the message has been forwarded, and re-forwarded, and re-re-re-re-re-forwarded.

There is no email virus that travels more slowly than email warnings. You cannot protect yourself against email viruses by reading email warnings. The only way to protect yourself is with good anti-virus software that you keep updated.

Nearly all VIRUS WARNING messages are either hoaxes, or wrong in important respects, or at the very least, several months, or even years, out of date.

How can you be sure? In this case, a simple search on Google:

virus "life is beautiful"

brings up the following websites at the top:

See how easy that was? Just go to Google.com (or your favorite search engine) and search on VIRUS and the name of the virus.

Please, promise yourself and your friends that WHENEVER You Get An Email Virus Warning, you will NEVER forward it to anyone else, or at least, that you will do a little fast simple research BEFORE you pass the warning along.

It isn't nice to frighten all your friends by passing along phony messages, even by accident, and now you know how to figure out if a VIRUS WARNING is really just a HOAX.

If you are in too much of a hurry to do the research first, then you should follow this simple Rule of Thumb:

"When you get ANY message that says FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE, you should throw it away immediately, and not send it to anyone."

That is always the right thing to do.

Now, please SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

(No, of course not. Just Kidding.)

-- Gary L. Dryfoos
DRYFOO.com - I/S Help You Can Understand

Here's more, from About.com

Valid CSS! Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional