a friend sent me this just now, thought I'd pass it along...


Subject: Important Warning



This was checked out on Snopes. It's for real

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 de stroyi ng 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.

That Life is Beautiful thing is a hoax destined to make you send this to all of your contacts:

More information on the Symantec Website

Kaethel

Yes, and here's the information about it on the Snopes website . Interestingly, this particular hoax dates back to 2002.

A bit of advice for the future: any time you get a 'virus' warning, look to see if there's any date in the warning, any link to a particular page of a website rather than just a generic 'it's been checked out by' Microsoft or IBM or Snopes or whoever. A real virus warning will link you to a page on Norton, for example, which contains specific, dated details of a virus threat and how to get rid of the virus. And it'll never tell you to email everyone you know about it - that's usually another way to recognise that it's a hoax: they're always worded in such a way as to try to induce mass panic.


Wendy

Just like the emails about you having to pay for MSN Messenger if you don't send the mail to at least 25 contacts or something I used to get them a lot