I opened this item, I thought it was a virus when it opened in win notepad... I have posted an enquiry earlier about the same... Anyway, how do I know whether it is in my system? Moreover, what does it do and how do I clean it ?!?
Kindly help all you can...
Regards. Paresh Pandit Tuesday, March 02, 2004 --------------------------------------------------------------------
Parish,
this is an off-list reply to your PhotoForum post because off-topic.
As to your particular virus, I have no idea. But google is your friend.
More generally, I noticed in your email headers that you are using Microsoft Outlook for email. This has three main problems:
1) Something like 85+% of the net uses Outlook of Outlook Express for email. Thus, the Outlook products are the number one target of all of those who write viruses and other malware.
2) Outlook's feature set for protecting you from email attacks is fairly small.
3) Microsoft has an established record of shipping products with security flaws.
So, in no particular order, here are the five best things you can do to protect yourself in the future:
A) Install a virus checker and scan at least once a week.Some are free. Google:
free virus program
or something like that.
B) Obtain and run a firewall. Zone Alarm is both free and good. www.zonelabs.com
C) Set your email client to not display HTML email by default. Use any setting that prevent Java and other scripts from running without asking.
D) Never open attachments if you are not sure who sent them. Safest is to only open them from friends, and if you expect one or have confirmed they sent it. (Email addresses are easily faked -- "spoofed" in the jargon.)
E) Switch email clients. Any non-Outlook client will help for reason (1) above. However, some are better on measure (2) than others. I personally prefer Thunderbird, but, if you are not very comfortable with your computer, I would not recommend it. (It is in version 0.5 which means it is still in delevelopment and may have bugs. It doesn't have easy, clickable installation procedures.) Similar functionality is built into Mozilla 1.6. Mozilla, from which Thunderbird is derived, includes an email client, a web browser, and some other things. Mozilla is based on Netscape, has a better feature set than Microsoft Internet Explorer, and scores better than it on the browser version of statements (1)-(3) above, too. Plus, it is open source, which means it is free of charge and free of most license restrictions. Both Thunderbird and Mozilla 1.6 can be obtained at www.mollia.org. (Aslo, you might check out Firefox 0.8 which is the stand alone web browser from Mozilla.)
Another free of cost email client (but not open source) is Pegasus Mail. Google it.
Hope that this helps. You can write back if you don't follow or want more information.
Best,
Brian van den Broek
