h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is important to stress the fact that a virus is _code_ and therefore needs to be run to take effect.
Therefore another step to protext yourself from viruses is not to run any code which is from an untrustworthy source.
Where this new "ILoveyou" virus and its variants was clever was in getting you to run the code without realising that this is what you were doing..by pretending it was a text attachment. In fact any file which has a suffix of .vbs (in windows) is a "Visual basic Script" file which is code.
If you get an email from someone with an attachment send them a mail back saying "Hi, I got this of you - did you mean to send it?" and only run it if you get possitive reassurance.

Good advice - it's also a good idea to keep an eye on a recognised antivirus news site such as http://www.sarc.com - these web sites are kept up-to-date with the latest news on virus releases, and can give you clues as to how to avoid being infected.

(warning - the following part of this post is a slightly humorous aside to those people who run Unix or Linux-based machines)

I received a message this morning about a new version of the 'ILoveYou' virus that DOES affect systems running Unix and Linux - apparently, it contains the following text:

Hello, this is the Linux version of the 'Love Bug'.

If you're running a variant of Unix or Linux, please forward this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random. Thank you!

(okay - joke over. Nothing to see here. Please move along)

Azimuth

Ha ha. I aint laffin

Okay, so it's not that funny... never said it would win any awards

Azimuth

Well, I thought it was funny

I spent a good few hours laughing at my MS-Junkie friends, with their Outlook clients configured to let anybody do anything via email who succumbed to the LoveBug virus... since I'm still on an old conferencing OLR which I have to tell to decode and run attachments - and will never hide file extensions (a 'feature' which is IMHO one of the most annoying MS have dreamt up) I'm pretty secure from email viruses.

Famous last words

Phil