Unfortunately, my computer caught this virus before I could intercept it.  It's nasty.

However, Norton has a "fix" for it at their website:

http://www.symantec.com/

It's called the SirC virus.

I'm glad only my computer got the "bug" and not me.

I am getting hundreds of E-mails from infected machines.

The virus carrying E-mail says:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks

There are other variants of this but this is the message I get.  This virus was detected 7/17/01 and has the highest risk warning from McAfee and is spreading world wide very fast.

I am not infected but obviously many are, from all the E-mails I get from infected machines.

DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENTS -  Often it will be a blank .txt file and another file (its the other file that is dangerous it seems).  It can have any extension and name it is selected at random from the infected machines My Documents file.

The virus gets your address to send to either from the infected users address book or finds e-mail addresses in the cache files of browser.  Since I have two huge websites, each of which gets about 2000 different visitors a day, I suspect that is why I am getting bombarded by these E-mails.  Anyone with websites having their E-mail address is vulnerable to getting these messages in mass.

More info is at http://vil.mcafee.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=99141&  It is the W32/SirCam@MM virus

I am setting up a filter to bounce all messages with that first line back to the sender with a message that your machine is infected and giving some reference info as above.

Sadly  the owner of an infected machine has no idea about the infection and that he is spreading SPAM messages with the virus all over the Internet.  That is why it is spreading so fast.  Further the virus is designed to start deleting files on infected computers on October 6 and/or will fill up harddisk space by adding text entries over and over again in the new (sircam) recycle bin it creates.

I've had McAfee all along & they were right on top of this latest
one, but I went ahead with the AVG download anyway.  The download takes quite a bit of time, but it was worth it.  AVG found a virus...1-worm/happy99...& two files were infected by it.  That one obviously slipped by McAfee somehow & I wasn't even awre of it.  The AVG program cleaned it up automatically.

Maybe with all the crap that goes on with this sort of thing no one virus shield is enough.  Or maybe everyone but me has known that all along??