LCleversey wrote: > > I'm very sorry to bother everyone right now but this is very important. > Right now Rootsweb's list are being hit with Worm's, it seems some how even with the protection Rootsweb installed these worm's are getting through to members. This worm's are coming in as attachments and you all must remember a very important thing DO NOT download anything from anyone you do not know or didn't ask for. Especially right now if an attachment come through ANY message from a Rootsweb's list DO NOT open it, or look's like a message from the list. > > One of the virus worms I know of is "party.exe". Here's another one, > W32.NewApt.Worm > To learn more about these worms and more please view the following; > http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/vinfodb.html > You can also type in a file name and it will tell you if it's a virus or not. There's a few other good virus sites out there, but I lost them this week when my computer decided to die on me :-(. Lisa, Thank you so much for the warning. I get these warnings all the time and have become somewhat complacent that most are hoaxes. I even have several of the anti-virus sites bookmarked and have sent out information to others at work about checking out virus warnings before forwarding them. Tonight, however, I received one of the viruses that you mentioned. It used a heading from an email that I sent to a friend right here in town in September (not through the list--just direct email). It sounded like a topic on which he would reply to me, but I thought it was strange that the website was just a humor site and had nothing to do with genealogy. Thank goodness my computer is finicky about opening attachments and would not open the attachment at the bottom of the page. The very next email that I read was your warning...and sure enough it was the W32.NewApt.Worm virus. I called my friend, and he DID NOT send me an email today. If anyone can explain how it took my four-months old email heading to him and sent it back to me with an attachment, I sure would like to know how it accomplished that little feat. So...I'm writing to second your warning and also to add...these emails may appear to be from someone you correspond with all the time and to be on topics that you would expect a genealogy correspondent to send you. I notice now that the heading looks a little different from my usual emails, in that it does not include a date line, but I don't know if this is always true. I plan to check out every attachment on the Symantic site before attempting to open it. The name of the virus is NOT what you'll see in the little attachment box's name line. Example: the name in the box on the virus just mentioned is "cooler1.exe." By searching that name on the anti-virus site it came up with the worm virus's name, description (exactly the text that had appeared on the email in question), and told me how to get rid of it in the event that I had opened it. Thanks again for the warning, Lisa. Sherry Johnson sherrjo@tenet.edu > >