I have received two email messages in the last two days that contain a file that contained a worm virus. One of these was sent out by HLFinder. I didn't DL either one because I was suspicious of both files. I emailed both parties and found out one of them definitely had the worm virus. In both cases, the files had two file extensions.

The following is a message posted on the State Police Association of Massachusetts Bulletin Board:

"Have you received an email from someone you know lately which reads like this:
"Hi! How are you? I send you this file in order to have your advice. See you later. Thanks".
If you have, and opened the attahced file, odds are that your computer has come down with the W32.sircam worm virus. When you double click the file, bango, the worm goes to work. This virus will change some system files on your PC and then select a document or other file from your computer at random and append a copy of itself to this file. The virus then emails the infected file to email addresses it finds on your system. In addition to sending the world one of your documents, the virus will also trigger on certain dates and can upon triggering fill your hard drive with garbage, delete files, and do other mean and nasty things. Your web guy here has received no fewer than 10 of these infected emails in the past 2 weeks. Most of them are coming from MediaOne accounts, for some reason.
The Symantec site (makers of Norton Antivirus) has a writeup on this problem as well as a downloadable removal tool. Even if you don't think you've been infected, you may want to run the removal tool anyhow. A link to the information page follows, from there you can get the free removal tool.

W32.SirCam.Worm Informational Page and Removal Tool "

I hope my warning comes in time so any of our posters can avoid the worm virus. Good luck!

Bob

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sircam.worm@mm.html

A link to the fix. Took me 20 minutes to download the fix and remove it from my computer. The virus targets many .exe files so don't freak out if many of your programs don't work initially. The IE .exe must not be targeted so you can access the internet to get the fix. The fix repairs your registry and once it's completed you will reboot the computer and everything should work as it did prior to the virus.

I received two more emails from a CF member this morning containing the worm virus. Apparently the virus is still lurking in some areas. Be extremely careful about downloading anything until you make sure it isn't this virus. I've sent an email to the CF member to let him know about the situation.

New comers to the board should review the data listed above to avoid the virus.

Bob

I got the same one about the advice. Watch out!

chris g

Thanks Bob for the information.

Unfortunately, several days ago I was one of those who opened the attachment to an email from a friend asking for "advice". Upon opening it I contacted the friend to ask why he was sending me the details of his son's wedding plans. He said he didn't and so I deleted the file.

I continued to use my computer, not knowing that I had just been "infected" by this worm virus. It wasn't until after Bob contacted me that I updated my Norton Anti-Virus and cleaned my computer of the worm "hopefully for good".

Thanks Bob for contacting me and giving me the heads up on this thing. I will be updating my virus program every week and running it to ensure that I have the latest "medicine" to kill these nasty things.

Ron
(CT Keeper)

Hi Everyone,

I also didn't realize I had opened a bad file. Unfortunately, I didn't have my anti-virus program working and up to date and I managed to infect my network at work.

Thanks to everyone who alerted me to the problem. I appreciate it.

Judy

I got a bogus email from you, Sunshine a few days ago. The bad grammar of the message and the unlikeliness of you sending me an attachment that you wanted my opinion about caused me to immediately delete the message.

John

Thanks Bob for the virus warning.

My work got nailed by the newest virus that came out last week and we are a company of over seven thousand employees. We are getting warnings from our security to limit our internet usage to business only! That hurts! My lunch time usually is right here in the forums!