[PPRAANet] Bugbear Virus Removal Utility

[Wes Wilson]

All --

Last Friday and Saturday an unfortunate incident unleashed the Bugbear virus
on a lot of the ham community.

There is a removal utility available from the McAfee site which can be
downloaded at no charge.  Ben Cruise (N�LNW) was having problems and this
utility took care of his problems.  I downloaded it and ran it on my machine
which came up clean.  This is a fairly quick and painless remedy for this
particular virus (or worm, or whatever it is -- I'm not a virus expert).  It
also checks for about three other common viruses which may be dormant on
your hard drive.  The utility is available at:

http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

If by any chance you received an E-mail from me with a subject of something
like "ARES Net Report" and dated back in 2001 -- delete it from your
computer immediately -- DO NOT OPEN.  Also, I believe it had an
attachment -- especially DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT.  I was lucky, when I
saw it I figured it was a fluke and blew it away, not thinking much about it
until later.

While the E-mail bears my name, it did not come from my computer (it shows
my E-mail as wlw@titan.com when, in actuality, my correct address is
wlw@prodigy.net).  It was picked by the virus at random from another ham's
inbox, an infected attachment attached, and then sent out to his address
book.

My thanks to Ben for calling the McAfee AVERT Stinger utility to my
attention.  I hope this helps any of you who might be experiencing problems.
If any of you have problems downloading this utility, I can send it to you
as an E-mail attachment.

73  Wes K�HBZ