Thanks for the Haptime warning and patch - and can I warn listees about the
Sircam virus?
I've spent most of today struggling to get it off my hard drive.
It comes in the form of a chatty email whose subject can vary, but whose
first line is always "Hi! How are you?" (or the equivalent in Spanish,
apparently. It looked much the same a pretty standard letter with an
attachment of Poetry for Snakeskin, so I opened the attachment rashly, not
noticing that the suffix was .doc.bat rather than just .doc.
I opened it, and there was a business fax form, nothing to do with me. I
realised there was something wrong, and got offline before the virus could
do too much damage.
What the SirCam virus does is select a random file from your My Documents
folder, and email it to everyone in your address book.
This has the potential to be pretty embarrassing. For example, I've got
plenty of students' addresses in my address book, and some of my documents
have confidential info about other students and teachers. Equally there are
one or two erotic poems in my folder that might be misunderstood if they
went to the wrong person...
Anyway, I unplugged quickly, so I think not too much got sent. I've had one
puzzled reply from someone whose name begins with A. Luckily he'd been sent
nothing more personal that a Benjamin Zephaniah poem that I'd copied for
class use. But maybe there are more that I'll hear about later.
The method for getting rid of the virus is at www.norton.com - but it
involved some technical stuff editing the windows registry that could itself
cause problems if mistakes are made. So please don't open suspicious-looking
attachments, especially from me.
I know some poets on this list are in my address book. If you got any
unwanted presents - could you let me know? It'll help me assess the damage.
George
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George Simmers
Snakeskin Poetry Webzine is at
http://www.snakeskin.org.uk
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