• SirCam and it's variants is clearly being a plague. I've been sent well over 50 copies of the virus in the last month in multiple languages, some clearly from people who have visited this page. On my vacation I tried to empty the recycle bin of a family member's computer and found this virus was running on (and therefore prompted me with an error that it could not be deleted from the recycle bin of) the computer I was trying to fix. I removed the virus on a family member's computer by following manual removal instructions from McAfee, although I didn't see anywhere in that document where it mentioned SirCam's 4th method of infecting (which is supposedly done only one in every 33 times) as described on F-Secure's page on SirCam.

July 23, 2001 (Minor Site News Update)

by Conrad VanderWoude:

• Update on Virus Alert info posted below: Although every copy of the file, called W32/SirCam@MM, used the text I showed, it apparently can use alternate similar phrases like:
  I hope you can help me with this file that I send
  The rest of the message other than the middle line, I think, are constant. You can read about it yourself at McAffee's Page on the virus. Also, the W95.Hybris.gen/Snowhite/SexyFun.Net virus has a page about it here and at http://www.sexyfun.net/ (the site that the E-Mails false appear to come from). Both of these viruses are not English-only; that is, there are versions of these viruses in other languages.

• Virus Alert: I don't intend to make this site a commonly-used anti-virus site. The site is supposed to be about Zelda games, not figuring out how to keep your computer working. However, in the last 4 days I've received 3 copies of a certain E-Mail which I believe is an "E-Mail virus", which would make this the heaviest-distributed virus I've personally encountered to date. One of the 3 different people that has E-Mailed it, each to a different address of mine, was the webmaster of a large Zelda site. The E-Mail may come from someone you know, and I'm guessing the subject is simply some random subject used by the person who (probably accidentally) sent you the virus. The contents of the message are as follows:

  Hi! How are you? I send you this file in order to have your advice. See you later. Thanks

  If you have Windows show all its extentions, the file will be double-extentioned, so if the subject of the E-Mail you receive is "Finding a key", the file attached might be called "Finding a key.doc.pif". Since most people have the final extention hidden by Windows, you may think it's a Word Document file ending with the .DOC extention.

  I have no idea what this virus does. I've been unable to look at it because it seems like every copy I have is corrupted and unsavable (and unrunnable) by my E-Mail program, but since it appears to be spreading I guess it can be opened with some popular program out there. My quick attempt to find out information about it on the search engines failed, and if today wasn't my first day of work I would have spent more time on this but I don't have the time. So if you see an E-Mail that says what's quoted above, don't open or run any attached "documents" or files. If you've found that you're infected, realize that these programs commonly E-Mail people in your address book and/or anyone who has sent you E-Mail recently and/or anyone whom you've recently sent E-Mail to, and they do it automatically without your knowledge. These things can be nasty. If you receive it, definitely E-Mail a reply back to the sender and tell them what you got from them. When I find more information about this file, like who it tends to E-Mail so you know who you may have infected so you know who you should inform if you've been infected, I'll post that info on this page.

  While I'm on the subject let me say that Snowhite is making another round. If you receive E-Mail about "Snowhite and the Seven Dwarfs" (yes, I realize the misspelling of her name), that's also a virus which is quite nasty: If you're connected to the Internet it can automatically download new updated versions of the virus so it has unlimited damage potential. Avoid that common one.