Life is Beautiful

VERY IMPORTANT WARNING
Please Be Extremely Careful especially if using Internet mail such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and so on. This information arrived this morning direct from both Microsoft and Norton.

Please send it to everybody you know who has access to the Internet. You may receive an apparently harmless email with a Power Point presentation "Life is beautiful." If you receive it DO NOT OPEN THE FILE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, and delete it immediately. If you open this file, a message will appear on your screen saying: "It is too late now, your life is no longer beautiful." Subsequently you will LOSE EVERYTHING IN YOUR PC and the person who sent it to you will gain access to your name, e-mail and password.

This is a new virus which started to circulate on Saturday afternoon. AOL has already confirmed the severity, and the antivirus software's are not capable of destroying it. The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself "life owner."

PLEASE SEND A COPY OF THIS EMAIL TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS and ask them to PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY.

I dutifully clicked the forward button and began to fill the To box with the email addresses of all my contacts, from Hotmail and Outlook. I was sailing past fifty and getting close to clicking Send.

But then I stopped and then I thought (like Mr. Noisy) and then I very quietly went to Google. After all who was it from? It mentions Microsoft but isn’t from Microsoft. Norton isn’t a company it’s one product of a company called Symantec.

There is also the dubious grammar and punctuation.

I typed, “Life is beautiful” into Google. Three of the first five links were headlined “The Life is Beautiful Virus Hoax”. The first was from Symantec and the second from McAfee.

It transpires that there is no such virus and that this is a nuisance email that has been kicking around since 2002. It dies back, almost dies out, then flourishes again and does nothing more than alarm people unnecessarily.

The advice form Symantec is to ignore it and delete it.

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