Virus awareness

Your email attachment could be carrying a virus. Virus programmers have different objectives that include the following:

• Damaging the programs and data on your home computer
• Using your computer and its Internet connection to spread viruses by collecting account numbers and passwords
• Using your computer to generate high volumes of traffic that can contribute to slowing down Internet traffic
• Infecting your home computer and using it to cause further damage via emails and the Internet

How they work

Viruses are hidden within attachments to email messages you receive. As viruses are programs that need to run on your computer to infect it, typical attachments that run programs are those with .exe, .scr, .pif, .bat, and .com

If you open the email and click on the attachment, some meaningless message will probably be displayed. You may, at the same time, have unwittingly activated a virus program and infected your computer.

Generally, email viruses are spread by reading all the email addresses you store in your computer address book and automatically sending copies of the email you received to all these addresses. In addition, the virus randomly selects addresses from your computer address book and inserts these in the ‘sender’ field of the outgoing email.

We are aware of these threats and take the necessary precautions to ensure all emails received from and sent to our customers are scanned for viruses by our systems.