It looks like Santa has brought us all some new viruses over the holidays.  There are several new ones being distributed via e-mail over the net.  

Check out this link for more info: [url]http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/[/url]

Ahh yes! I had quite a fun couple days with some POS program called Win32 that implanted itself on my computer. It would cause trashy pop ups to appear even when connected or not to the web. Hot Hot Hot and some other junk would show up every ten minutes or so. The wife loved that let me tell ya. No problem with porn mind ya, only the garbage this stuff was and it's different when you don't have control when to look at it or not. After a few fruitless anti pop downloads it was still there. Only after doing a search by date (I knew when it started) from my start menu and using the Find program did I see that this Win32 and deleted it. Sounds a bit different than the one listed above but the name is stikingly similar.

^

Anyone who uses Windows and doesn't use some kind of virus protection is asking for a virus.  Although keeping any individual's computer clean is the individual's responsibility, the ISP I work for does apply some filters to catch a few of the the email transmitted viruses out there.  This is just from the mail sent yesterday with a user base of approximately 20,000 and yesterday was a holiday.

# cat badtrans_worm.log goner_worm.log snow_white.log virus_sircam.log | wc -l
  7435

Potentially those messages could have gone to over 1/3 of our users who if unprotected and ignorant would have become infected.

The Internet isn't the warm and fuzzy place it used to be [:(].