Letter: Letters : Virus by e-mail

From Lewis Conquer

Thaxted, Essex

I was interested to see your reference to a new type of computer virus that
resides in the macros of document files (Feedback, 12 October, p 84). Because
the viruses do this, they are often missed by virus scans, as most people only
scan executable files. You will only detect them by scanning all files.

I have suffered from the MSWord concept virus, which I received in a document
attached to an e-mail message. It is fortunately only an irritation rather than
a disaster: when you use the “save as” instruction to save a file you have
already saved under another name, the virus will only allow you to save to the
template directory, unless you enter the complete adddress.

A fix is available from the Microsoft Web site which will eliminate the
virus, something many antivirus tools will not do. Information supplied with the
protection tool lists a number of other macro viruses, the most dangerous being
the “nuclear” virus. This is so named because if you open a document, any
print-out made in the next 60 seconds will have the message “Stop all nuclear
testing in the Pacific”. The most damaging thing the nuclear virus does is on 5
April of any year, when it deletes crucial DOS files, crashing the system.

Lesson? Check all incoming files attached to e-mail messages. Check all files
using up-to-date virus tools.