This is a great opportunity to take advantage of a remarkable confluence of circumstances, my insomnia and the virus I just received in the mail from someone I know (Don't worry I won't out you Grandma). Anyway, the warning is part of the story,

So if you want to know what the deal is, read on.

As with most viruses these days, this one arrived in the email, with the heading "Re: Your password!" Now, I have more passwords than I can bother remembering, so this sounded innocuous enough as I routinely have to ask one service or another for a password I've forgotten, and I took a look at the email even though I wasn't waiting for a password.

One look at the text and I had no doubt that the email was some sort of virus and a closer look revealed an executable attachment, a dead giveaway as this is how many viruses deliver their payload. This brings us to my first suggestion (*** indicates a good rule for computing) one that probably isn't new to you.

***Never ever click on a file in an email unless you are absolutely positively sure it is something you are expecting, and it is the something you are expecting. You may want to email the person back and confirm the validity of the attachment. You certainly want to have a virus program that checks all incoming email for viruses (and outgoing too for that matter).

Anyway, I surfed over to symantec.com (the makers of Norton Antivirus) and determined that I had received "W32.Frethem.K@mm" which is a brand new, but pretty boring virus. Much like the recent Klez virus, it finds your address book and sends itself to all your friends, clients, and puppies, whatever. It's annoying, it's potentially embarrassing, but it doesn't do all that much harm according to Symantec. Symantec is a great source of information, and this is one of the reasons Quick Byte recommends and sells Norton Antivirus 2002.

***Use Norton Antivirus 2002. I do not like McAfee Online at all, or any of the others nearly as much as I like Norton. It isn't perfect, but it is the best I know of and many experts agree with me.

Now, if Norton is so great, how come it didn't catch this virus, you may be wondering, I know I was. So, I took a look at the Norton Antivirus System Status Display and sure enough the virus definition database hadn't been updated since 7/3. I'm not exactly sure why it hadn't automatically updated itself, I may have stopped it for some reason for all I know, or there may have been a problem with the Live Update Server, I can think of several more reasons, but it doesn't really matter. What does matter is this:

***It is up to you to stay on top of important things like Virus Protection and backing up and whatnot. It's great that Norton can automatically update itself, and automatically scans your system, but unless you keep an eye on things, you are increasing your risk significantly. If computers worked properly all the time, I wouldn't even know most of you, let alone be writing this newsletter. Here are 3 ways to stay on top of the situation:

***Know how the antivirus program works and know the basics of how to keep your computers virus-free. I'm trying to cover as much ground as I can here, but there is plenty more to know.

***Make sure the virus definitions are up to date. Norton's Live Update will update them once a week, but Symantec places directly downloadable files on its site more often. In this instance, even though my defs. were less than two weeks old I still almost got nailed and I'm sure plenty of people did in similar circumstance. Klez also blew through a very narrow window (less than the one week that Live Update works with) and infected millions of computers. Be vigilant of the virus defs, or your just wasting your time.

***Run a full system scan once a week and make sure it is being run. I prefer to run them manually. Many of my clients prefer to run them automatically. Either way, make sure it is being done

Of course, even if you do all of these things, you are still at risk for infection, as people are trying to beat these systems but there is at least one more thing you can do to protect yourself,

***Run Windows Update. Windows Update frequently provides critical security fixes to Windows and Internet Explorer/Outlook Express. Indeed this virus can be executed automatically (without you clicking on the infected executable file) if you haven't run Windows Update on a regular basis.

Ok, that's enough of that, a few quick links and we're done.

For more Information about W32.Frethem.K@mm

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.frethem.k@mm.html

To directly download Norton Virus Definition Updates