Walt, I agree with you completely.  Our IT does daily sometimes multi times daily signature updates and our terminals are updated along with this and scanned for all incoming and disk reads.  For the most part this is done in the background and and the end user rarely sees anything.  I also agree thee majority of the bugs come from the direct to you messages harvested by these bugs  or from people who do not know they are infected.  I have gotten two attached files from another list that were infected.  One got through as it was a truly new virus that had not been put into the signatures yet and the second was caught in its tracks by the Norton program.  

Nonetheless I will need to wait and see if I can convince IT that I am for the most part doing all that I can to keep my system and the intra-network  clean.  

I will let you all know when I finally leave the list if I indeed have to do so.  Is there anyone at ST JOHNS who could assure us that they are not propagating anything?


Thank You!

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>>> Walt Smith <[log in to unmask]> 11/30/01 12:59PM >>>
The problem is that people *think* that something has come from a list
because the subject line contains something that's been discussed on a list.
Actually, many of the more common viruses will steal mailing list subject
lines and then propagate themselves to individuals and if the recipient of a
virus-infected message isn't careful in looking at the actual message
headers, they'll believe that the message came from a list when it didn't.
The St. Johns University (Maelstrom) server cannot transmit a virus and
that's all there is to it.  If you believe you have received a virus via any
St. Johns list, you are wrong.  You received a virus because a message
written by you to a list was used by a virus to collect your address, but
the virus did *not* come via the list.

If users would practice the fundamentals of intelligent computing in the
first place, their systems wouldn't become infected.  Buy a good antivirus
program, keep it current on a daily basis and scan all incoming email; never
open an attachment that you aren't *absolutely* sure of.  Do both of these
and you will *never* have a virus infection.

--
 Walt Smith - Raleigh, NC
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