This is not a joke...be careful!!!

Astrid/

At least eight variants on the "Love Bug" rogue computer program have been
identified since it made its appearance on Thursday, virus researchers said.
The malicious programs, which set off storms of bogus viral messages and can
delete computer files, masquerade as the near-ubiquitous e-mailed joke list
and as a heart-stopping notice that the recipient's credit card has been
billed for more than $300.

_____ What to Do _____

If you see "ILOVEYOU", "Joke", or "Very Funny" in the subject line of your
e-mail, delete the message immediately. Do not open the attachment!
•

Additional information:

We have processed your order and are charging your account $326.95," reads
the message with a subject line "Mother's day order confirmation." Click on
the attachment and the same computer program used by the "loveletter" attack
kicks into action.
The programs seek out and deletes a wide range of files on the victim's hard
drive, including pictures in the "jpg" and "jpeg" formats, music files in
"mp2" and "mp3," and programs written in such languages as Java and Visual
Basic. It does not delete, for example, Microsoft Word files, which are
stored in the "doc" format.
None of the new variants targets different types of files for deletion,
virus researchers said.
Since computer viruses and worms are software creations, and since the
people who write the software share it among themselves to show off and to
improve their wares, viruses quickly mutate. The loveletter program is
particularly well suited to being rewritten, said Peter G. Neumann, a
computer security researcher at SRI. "It's sort of a universal Turing
machine," he said, referring to the totally adaptable computing apparatus
envisioned by British computing pioneer Alan Turing.
One of the mutated viruses apparently emerged from Lithuania and bears the
subject line "Susitikim." Three of the variants on the love letter theme
were rewritten ineptly and cannot spread themselves across the Internet,
said Sal Viveros, director of the McAfee anti-virus division of the software
company Network Associates. Five of the e-mails have been traded among
researchers, but have not yet shown up "in the wild," Viveros said.
The intense publicity surrounding the love letter attack has helped warn
people not to open the attachments for those messages, Viveros said, but the
more important, broader warning - don't open any attachment you're not
expecting - hasn't penetrated and so the company is receiving reports that
the new variants are having an effect: "Loveletter, we think we're getting a
handle on but we're seeing a lot of 'very funny' because people are always
getting jokes from all over the place."
"Users should exercise extreme caution in opening attachments and should not
open executable attachments including files with a .VBS extension," said
Jeff Carpenter of the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center
at Carnegie Mellon University.

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