Latest count of how many millenium viruses?

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This was asked here a while back, but I had trouble finding it in the archives. I just got an email entitled "Prep for January 1, 2000", which contained the following:

***There are rumors of many viruses set to go off on January 1st, so updating virus definition files should also be part of Y2K preparedness.***

If anyone bumps into the thread or has topical links to share, that would be great.

-- Tim (pixmo@pixelquest.com), December 13, 1999

Answers

No info regarding that but just a funny thing that happened recently...Are you or do you know someone that likes to FWD anything they get in their Email? I started telling people to cut that crap out over a year ago. Had one girl that would fill my Email box twice a day with junk FWD's...finally got all over her ass about it and she don't talk to me or FWD crap to me anymore. Heard from another freind that this girl just spent $800 and lost her comp for three weeks due to the fact that she got a virus...Hmm...you think it might be from all those FWD's she gets and sends? I would have been highly pissed if she sent whatever she got to me and I managed to let it infect my system. One of those people that just DFGI about anything much less Y2K.

-- Satanta (Deletes@llUnknowns.com), December 13, 1999.

Satanta, I am with you. Geeeze I hate those fwd, fwd, fwd. Right after that I hate the message that if I don't forward it I shall go blind in three days, my family will meet violent ends, and my teeth will all fall out.

I am as bad as the rest, I did read a few weeks back that there was information that some 200,000 viruses were set to be let loose mostly from Africa, Russia. But, while I recall reading this same information several times in different spots, don't remember where. But not too long ago, a few weeks.

-- Richard (Astral-Acres@webtv.net), December 13, 1999.


I think the 200,000 was just a guess put out by one of hte companies that sell anti-virus software (Symantec, I think).

-- Danny (dcox@ix.netcom.com), December 13, 1999.

I heard the 200,000 figure on the McAlvany Intellaigence Advisor in connection with the Y2K Symposium held in New York end of October. Someone there said they expected 200,000 and have identified 40,000. I don't know if it was the Naval War College or the FBI.

-- Pete Keber (pkeber@island.net), December 13, 1999.

The Norton antivirus people, as of a couple of days ago, had found one y2k virus loose in the wild so far. If you are running Internet Explorer (microsoft) it replaces your home page with some other page. It doesn't have any visible effect with Netscape, so stays hidden. On Jan 1, it will erase your hard drive, according to Symantec.

It is passed as an e-mail attachment.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 13, 1999.



my husband jon found a y2k virus a few days ago on our friend bill's machine, along with 4 other viruses. bill was shocked because he had set up his norton antivirus to do automatic updates every week. but here's the catch--he uses windows 98, and norton antivirus will NOT do the automatic updates on his version of Win98, although it will do so on Win95 and NT.

-- jocelyne slough (jonslough@tln.net), December 14, 1999.

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