The Elmira college cyber gurus sent this out and Ithought you would all appreciate this heads up. I'd hate any of you to have get a visit by the un-Merry Christmas virus.


Please read carefully the following descriptions of the Prelissa.A virus.

WARNING THE PRELISSA.A VIRUS
The Prelissa.A virus, named the Christmas virus because it only
executes on December 25, is a highly destructive virus that can
format the C drive of Windows 95/98 users. Please read the following
information to be sure that it does not infect your machine.

HOW TO RECOGNIZE IT
The subject line in your e-mail message will read "Message From
" The message starts, "This document is very Important and
you've GOT to read this!!!" and contains an attached Word document
(virus protection sites do not specify the name of the document).
DON'T OPEN THE DOCUMENT!

WHAT IT IS A MACRO VIRUS?
Although Prelissa.A is referred to as e-mail virus, it is in fact a
Word 97 macro that is ATTACHED to your e-mail document. A macro is
a set of commands built-in a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document that
is capable of doing good things such as doing repetitive Word tasks
but bad things like harming data.

*** WARNING! You should NEVER open attachments (typically Word
documents, EXE files) whose origin is unknown. In fact, we recommend
avoiding attachments as much as possible.***

HOW PRELISSA.A IS EXECUTED
1. You ignore this warning and double-click the macro file to open
it into Word 97.
2. The virus executes and disables macro protection.
3. If the computer is turned on December 25th the virus will write
instructions to format the hard drive the next time the computer is
restarted.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO ELMIRA COLLEGE?
The College is closed on Christmas day so most users will not be
affected. To be safe, turn off your computer before leaving for the
holidays.

Only Windows 95/98 users are affected. Macintosh and Windows NT
users can not execute the virus although they could pass it on by
sending the attachment to another person.

HOW TO AVOID PRELISSA.A
Do NOT double-click the attached Word 97 macro. That will launch the
program and infect your system.

Spider-tryingtohelp-Boy