I received this in E-mail this morning and wanted to pass it along. Take precautions:

Steve in Oregon

VIRUS ALERT - IRC/Stages.worm

Dear McAfee.com Dispatch Subscriber:

IRC/Stages.worm is an Internet worm that began spreading rapidly on 6/19. McAfee AVERT has assessed it as a HIGH-risk threat. McAfee.com Clinic users who used VirusScan Online after 6/16 have protection against this worm. The worm uses Microsoft Outlook to send copies of itself to all entries in the address book and through installations of Pirch, ICQ and mIRC.* It also spreads to all available mapped drives on your system.

This worm will arrive in an email message with this format:


Subject: "Funny", "Jokes", or "Life Stages", sometimes followed by "Text"
Content: "The male and female stages of life"

Attachment: "LIFE_STAGES.TXT.SHS" (the suffix ".SHS" may be hidden)


If the attachment is run, the user sees a list of jokes while the worm infects the system and attempts to send copies of itself to all addresses in Outlook address book, as well as through the other channels mentioned above.
* Pirch is an internet relay chat client for Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT, mIRC is a shareware IRC chat client for Windows and ICQ lets you initiate IRC style chat sessions - it alerts you when your friends are online and lets you chat with them.

McAfee.com




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