The following is what our IT people have told us about this recent virus.

Betty Siegel

Many of you have probably received some strange emails in the last two days.  There is a new variant of an e-mail virus that has been flooding the Internet and e-mail systems.  The virus carries an attachment that, if opened, will infect your PC and send the virus to everyone in your Outlook Contacts list.

The virus is able to "spoof" e-mail addresses so that you may receive virus-infected e-mails from someone you know.  You may also receive notifications from someone stating that they received an infected e-mail from you, when you didn't even send any e-mail to them.

These e-mails may contain subject lines and messages listed below.  

If you are interested in the full technical details of the virus (and information on how to protect your home computers) please see http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=100561 .


Infected E-mails May Contain the Following Information:
Subject: 
* Your details 
* Thank you! 
* Re: Thank you! 
* Re: Details 
* Re: Re: My details 
* Re: Approved 
* Re: Your application 
* Re: Wicked screensaver 
* Re: That movie 
Attachment: 
* your_document.pif 
* document_all.pif 
* thank_you.pif 
* your_details.pif 
* details.pif 
* document_9446.pif 
* application.pif 
* wicked_scr.scr 
* movie0045.pif 
Body: 
* See the attached file for details 
* Please see the attached file for details 


 -----Original Message-----
From:   Jill Lasker [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent:   Wednesday, August 20, 2003 3:33 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Surge in junk mail w/attachments?

Have other members of this list suddenly been besieged in the last 2-3 days
with junk?  I keep getting emails with a subject line "RE: details" and they
all simply say "Please see the attached file for details."  All the files
have a .pif extension (what is that?).  They're all from seemingly
legitimate addresses, but no one I actually know.

At least one of the addresses it came from was a legitimate display company,
which is why I wondered if any of you were getting them too.

Obviously, I haven't opened any of the attachments, but I have no idea where
this flood originated.  I'm on a Macintosh, so it's not part of the Windows
virus brigade, I presume.

Any clues?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jill Lasker
Writer/Editor/Researcher
Medicine/Bioscience/History
http://home.earthlink.net/~laskerj/

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The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes).

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