Another virus making the rounds these days. BADTRANS is the usual – arrives as an e-mail attachment, sends itself back out to lots of people with your name on the message as the sender, does a couple of dirty deeds on your computer. If you’re infected, here’s an explanation of what the virus does and how to get rid of it.
But if you’re infected – well, why is that? It shouldn’t be a surprise that you need to run an antivirus program and you need to keep it up to date. Norton Antivirus 2002 is cheap, easy to install and update, and is relatively stable. (It does have a quirk – the first time you run LiveUpdate, you’ll see a small windows that says “Checking subscription status.” It can take as long as ten minutes for that window to go away. Eventually it does and it never appears again.)
And bear in mind that Service Pack 2 for Office 2000 includes a security update for Outlook that prevents most virus attachments from ever reaching you. Here’s the Office Update site where you can get that service pack. The new version of Outlook in Office XP has those features built in. Well worth it for the peace of mind for most people.
