Dear colleagues, Please accept my profound apologies for having inadvertently transmitted a virus to you. I discovered the problem today when a colleague told me that he had received two copies of a letter from me, and that one contained a "happy99.exe attachment" that displays fireworks on the screen. Then, I received a flood of gently-worded complaints, warnings and useful advice from around the world.
*** Here is vital information that you will find useful *** 1. Do NOT open the happy99.exe attachment. (Do not open any suspicious or apparently frivolous .exe files, however reliable the source is known to be, because the sender may be unaware of the transmission)! 2. If you have already opened the happy99.exe attachment, then your computer will have been infected. 3. If your computer has become infected, then here is the following useful information provided by the latest version of the Norton AntiVirus software: "This worm modifies WSOCK32.DLL to send itself as attachment when a posting is made to USENET or MAIL. Delete SKA.EXE and SKA.DLL in WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder and replace WSOCK.DLL with WSOCK32.SKA in WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder". 4. I am informed by another source that apart from the above-mentioned activity, this virus is otherwise harmless. 5. I suggest that after doing the above, you run a manual check of all your hard disks, using the latest version of your AntiVirus program. If, like mine, your AntiVirus software is not the latest version, you should update it immediately. I updated my Norton AntiVirus software using the LiveUpdate feature, that automatically updates itself via the Internet. 6. If you have been infected, you should send a test message after fixing the problem, to check that the virus really has been eliminated. 7. IMPORTANT: If you opened the happy99.exe attachment, then *after* proceeding according to the above instructions, please, please send a copy of this information to all correspondents to whom you have subsequently sent e-mail messages. 8. I received the virus from one of you and passed it on to all the rest. Therefore, all of you, do please make sure to check for and eliminate the virus from your computers. We're terribly sorry to have been such a nuisance to so many people but, as you will now understand, we had absolutely no idea about what was happening, or even that an attachment of any sort was being made. The virus left no record of this activity on our system. The minute the problem was discovered, we ceased all further e-mail transmissions and worked on the solution. Before sending the message you are now reading, we verified that we are no longer sending the offending attachment by sending a message to our second e-mail address. Best regards from a (hopefully) fully-recovered and harmless Novarex in the sunny city of Jerusalem, and now back to some constructive work... David Drori Novarex Enterprises Ltd., POB 2833, Luz Building, 5 Kiryat Hamada Street, Har Hotsvim, Jerusalem 91028, Israel. Tel: +972 2 586 4546 Fax: +972 2 586 5890 Mobile: +972 5 067 8686 E-mail: [email protected]
