If you have been referred to this page, then it is likely that Alentus has received an email that appears to be from you that contains a virus.

Your local workstation is probably infected and is most likely sending the virus to other addresses it "finds" on your computer. Viruses "harvest" email addresses from locations such as your email address list, saved emails, or even documents it finds on your hard disk. The viruses can even take "chunks" of text found on your hard disk and use them in the body of the message it composes and attaches itself to.

Viruses will often "forge" a sender's address, making it appear that the email is being sent by someone else - in this case, the infected email that we received may not actually have been sent by your workstation, but by another workstation that has your email address stored on it somewhere.

Obviously this whole situation is highly undesirable as not only does it present a security risk, with sensitive material possibly being contained in the body of an email sent to "random" recipients, but as the virus spreads the additional traffic it creates can overload the mail servers and the internet in general. Eventually, after a period of time (a few months), the virus will often attempt to destroy data on your workstation. All this can occur without your knowledge until the day your workstation is corrupted or an antivirus program detects its presence.

We recommend that you proceed as follows:

Go to http://www.sarc.com ; you do not have to be a Symantec/Norton customer to use their removal tools. They provide these virus removal tools as a courtesy.

1. Download the removal tool for your virus, to a brand new, clean floppy disk. Write protect the disk.
2. Restart your system in Safe mode.
3. Run the downloaded file.
4. Restart your system.
5. Keep your antivirus definitions updated weekly.
6. Ensure email scanning is enabled.

Additonally, a top rated free antivirus program is available from AVIRA called “AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic” and can be downloaded from the following URL: http://www.free-av.com

There are also a number of antivirus vendors that offer a free online version that can be used to scan and disinfect your system. Check out one such offering from “Trend Micro” at: http://housecall.trendmicro.com

Article ID: 97, Created: March 8, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Modified: March 8, 2011 at 5:29 PM

Your Email Contains a Virus

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