I know many of you hate seeing these warnings being issued because you have already taken the step to purchase an Anti Virus Software program. However having read the article below I would like to comment that over the last few weeks I have received at least 6 emails titled 'Snow White and the Seven dwarves'. Fortunately my anti virus software refused to accept the attachments. The source of this article is Woody's Office Watch a reputable e-magazine covering MS Office products John List Administrator FHA-NQ & AUS-NQ **************************************************** MELISSA VIRUS RIDES AGAIN Our old 'friend' Melissa has had many variants since it first appeared in March 1999 - see WOW http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v4-n14 for details. There's a new and virulent version that's appeared in the last few days, called W97M.Melissa.W. If you open an infected email attachment it will send out a copy of itself to 50 people in your Outlook address book. The outgoing message is headed: Important Message From <your name> . Then there is 'Melissa X' another new variant that does similar things, but appears to be a Office for the Macintosh document. Since Office Mac documents can be read by Office for Windows there's the opportunity for cross-platform infection. Only Office 97 or 2000 for Windows can spread infected documents via mass-mailing to your address book (because it needs Outlook to do that). However Macintosh created documents can contain the virus. It's been a while since the first Melissa and enough time has past for people to forget about it and for network administrators to drop their guard. That may explain why these new variants have been spreading quickly in the last few days. And that's not the only virus to be spreading via email in recent times. Some WOW readers have been infected with the 'Hybris' virus that sends out infected messages usually with the heading 'Snow White and the Seven dwarves'. A new variant of this virus picks up email addresses to infect from the body of an existing message (not just the FROM address or your address book). We know some WOW readers are infected because we've been getting infected messages to addresses only published in the most recent issue of WOW. Not a problem for us, we get hundreds of emails each hour so a few more don't count. Sadly we can't trace these back to their source. So please update your anti-virus software today, check your entire computer, Inbox and Sent Items for viruses and be careful of incoming email attachments. The general advice in our Melissa issue http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v4-n14 still holds today.