Halloween E-mail Viruses More Trick than Treat
CorePROTECT warns about holiday viruses
San Diego, CA - October 28, 2003 - CorePROTECT is warning computer users to be especially vigilant over the Halloween week for e-mail that may potentially contain viruses or other malicious code.
In 2002, computer users were affected by three main pieces of malicious code - LittleWitch, Pocus and Klez. These viruses were entitled "Allhallowmas", an e-mail greeting that uses Halloween as the hook to entice people to open infected attachments. Some of the attached executables found in 2002 included: trickortreat.exe, happyhalloween.exe and trickor1.exe.
As usual, you are urged not to pass on warnings of this kind, as the continued forwarding of these hoax warnings simply wastes time and e-mail bandwidth. In addition to viruses, some e-mail warnings are hoaxes themselves, which are harmless but are designed to cause unwarranted concern.
Consequences of these Halloween viruses can include the theft of important data from your computer such as system, network and account information. In some rare cases PC hard drives were wiped out and entire network mass storage devices were reformatted.
CorePROTECT offers the following four simple precautions to take this Halloween:
- Exercise extra caution when opening e-mail relating to Halloween; even if the e-mail is sent by people you know
- Ensure your computer has been updated with the latest anti-virus software and make sure it is configured to scan all e-mail attachments
- Ensure your anti-virus software virus definitions are current
- Delete suspicious looking e-mails.
For further information on CorePROTECT and its data restoration solutions, please visit http://www.coreprotect.com.
About CorePROTECT
CorePROTECT, headquartered in Carlsbad, California, markets restoration and encryption hardware for PCs. Its products reduce downtime by providing instant recovery if a system or application file is corrupted or deleted.
Operating systems, complex configurations and critical applications are protected from malicious or inadvertent tampering and data is protected from unauthorized access through advanced encryption technology and hard drive partitioning. For further information on CorePROTECT and its products, please visit http://www.coreprotect.com.