Dear Listers: Now, I don't want to scare any one, as likely many will escape any consequences from this worm, but you need to be sure you are doing your part to keep your machine clean. We must all be diligent in this effort. If we all keep up we will do really well keeping an infection free environment. Yesterday I received tons of oddball messages. They are coming from everywhere. Most from people I have *never* heard of. I have anti-viral protection running at all times. I update daily. I run spot scans with an alternate anti-viral system. I keep my computer virus free. I was checking my computer and parts there of no less than once an hour yesterday! I have removed all my messages from my in box to alternate folders. I also manually scanned for virus components for the newest baddie on the block.... W32.bugbear Here's a snippet from http://www.antivirus.com Risk rating:Medium Virus type: Worm Destructive: No Aliases: NATOSTA.A, W32/Bugbear-A,Tanatos, W32/[email protected] Description: This worm terminates antivirus processes and propagates by sending itself via email using its own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) engine. The email that it sends out contains no message body http://www.symantec.com posts this Security Response: [email protected] is a mass-mailing worm that is rapidly spreading to Windows users. The subject and attachment name of incoming emails are randomly chosen. The attachment will have a double extension ending in .exe, .scr, or .pif. When visiting http://www.grisoft.com/ and scrolling down to News, Virus Alerts and Press Releases, a click on more information will give the following details: I-Worm/Bugbear (alias I-Worm/Keywo) After its launching, this worm copies itself into System folder using the same filename as in the e-mail. Then it distributes itself onto different e-mail addresses that are stored in Adress book of the infected computer. Also, it tries to find a computer where whole disk full access sharing is allowed, and copies itself into Startup folder, which enables its launching. . . . and goes on with further description and removal instructions. http://www.mcaffee.com posts the following on their site: W32/[email protected] Help Center W32/[email protected] is rated as MEDIUM RISK FOR HOME AND CORPORATE USERS. This mass-mailing worm attempts to send itself to email addresses found on an infected system. . . There is more to be read about this worm and what it may do. Don't panic, read what you can do to disable it, should you feel you have be subjected to it. Make SURE that your anti-viral program is installed, up-to-date, and ACTIVATED. And... with this particular one, I would go and read the manual removal instructions to be on the safe side. The AVG site www.grisoft.com has a removal tool specific to this worm. You may want to visit their site and read more. IF you don't have anti-virus software, or have not renewed yours in a long time, you can scan your computer drives while online for free at http://www.antivirus.com AVG is also a very good resident anti-virus program. Grisoft also offers a free downloadable version. You can pay and get technical support too, if you want, but I have had good results with the free version, as have had others who recommended it to me. If you are an Internet Explorer/MS Outlook user, visit http://www.microsoft.com and download the latest versions or patches. Lastly, this is NOT intended to start a thread on the list about viruses, wierd mail, etc. Do not send replies to the list re this message, please. All correspondence re viruses should be directed to the List Admin privately. With regard to the Lists at Rootsweb and viruses, you can visit their help site to read their statement: http://helpdesk.rootsweb.com/announce.html#virus Another thought to consider is to stop using the fancy html code type of email and return to plain text messaging only. It may not provide the pretty colors and bells and whistles, however, it makes it darn hard for viruses to hide in a message... they cannot. Check your "help" dictionary in your email client for how to turn off the HTML encoding. I prefer all messages to come to me in plain text and that is how I compose them. I never have been caught up with the html for email craze. :) Regards, Lauren List Admin