The "Jokes" Virus or Stages worm is fairly common these days and easy to
fix.

At the Symantec Anti-Virus Research Centre I found the following information
at:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/vbs.stages.a.html

NAV currently detects this worm as Bloodhound.VBS.Worm. This worm appears as
an attachment titled LIFE_STAGES.TXT.SHS. Execution of this attachment will
open a text file in Notepad displaying the male and female stages of life.
Whilst the user is reading the text file the script is executing in the
background. This worm spreads itself using Outlook, mIRC and PIRCH.
SARC suggests that corporate customers configure their email filtering
systems to filter out or stop all incoming emails that have attachments with
.SHS extensions.

Click here [http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/fix.vbs.stages.html ]
to download tool to repair VBS.Stages.A damage

Also known as: IRC/Stages.worm, Life_Stages Worm, VBS_Stages.A  there are 12
Subjects that are common - Jokes is one of them

Category: Worm

Infection length: 39,936 bytes

Virus definitions: June 16, 2000

Removal is Difficult:
Detailed removal instructions are available from the Symantec Technical
Support Knowledge Base on this page
[http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nav.nsf/docid/2000061913271906] .

There's lots more on this page, and there will be more information at other
anti-virus centres.  This is a start - good luck!

Alison


-----Original Message-----
From: Mary [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, October 07, 2000 2:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Jokes Virus


Okay, so I opened the silly thing before reading the warning. How do I
get rid of the virus?