Avery and List. Avery, thank you very much. As I usually do, I checked with several sites before answering, THIS IS NOT A HOAX, EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. I copied some info, and at the end I pasted Symantec site, where you can get the antivirus, this site also includes several antivirus for the most dangerous latest viruses as Melissa. http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/ The CIH Virus Attacks Dateline: 9/4/98 The CIH virus is one of the most malicious and ground breaking viruses to be developed in the underground world. First identified in Taiwan back in June, the CIH virus has spread throughout the world on Windows 95 and 98 PCs, infecting applications when executed. On the 26th of each month infected PCs may have their hard drives and flash BIOS chips overwritten! CIH is a fast spreader because it started in Asia, where illegal copies of software run rampant in some Asian countries. Both legal and illegal copies of software have been infected by the CIH virus, including the ever-popular "Wing Commander," by Origin Systems. The virus uses several advanced stealth techniques to help hide it's presence on an infected PC. If the hard drive of an infected PC is overwritten, backups of data can easily be restored to a reformatted drive. Resetting the Flash BIOS is another story... Flash BIOS is normally protected by a jumper on the motherboard. But, some machines have the jumper set to the "on" position for Flash BIOS modifications. If the CIH virus overwrites the Flash BIOS the machine will not boot until the chip is reprogrammed. That translates to major down time for most users. How CIH works Once you've run an infected program, it goes resident in memory-- it just sits there and waits. Now, whenever you open another executable file, the infected program checks to see if it's a "portable executable" file (that's the format used for executable files in Windows 95 and 98). The virus then checks whether the file can be infected. It can only be infected if there's enough room for the virus. If there is enough room, it infects the file. If the virus can't infect the file-- or if the file has already been infected-- it checks the next condition. The next condition Is it the 26th of the month? If the answer is yes, the virus tries to overwrite your BIOS. Then it trashes your hard drive. GO TO THIS ADDRESS, AND YOU WILL FIND ALL YOU NEED TO TEST YOUR COMPUTER: http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/
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