Mr Sillah,

The Ethan.x virus (has a few variations) is a Visual Basic
macro virus. It spreads inside your PC by attaching itself
to the global Normal.dot document used by all Microsoft
Word documents. When you open up other Word docs, it copies
itself to them since opening any Word document also opens
up the Normal.dot template which is already impregnated.

From the look of it, the virus just pops up a message box
at the second of every month or so, warning about Y2K. In
the code I saw (variation D), there no harm done to your
PC, except for the annoying messages. It also bloats up
your documents.

A good virus checker will get rid of it. Otherwise you can
delete your infected Word docs, uninstall Microsoft Office,
and reinstall, making sure you explicitly delete the
Normal.dot document (the uninstaller will probably not
delete it).

As a general warning about macro viruses (most of them out
there are now macro viruses, because they're so easy to
write and copy), if Word fires up a message box saying that
the document you're opening contains macros and asks if you
want to disable the macro, choose disable. You can then go
inside the Visual Basic editor (Alt-F11) and look at the
code and maybe copy it to a text file and send it to someone
who can figure out what it's trying to do. Best of all, get
some virus protection software and make sure to update it
frequently--the vendors probably post updates to their sites
every couple of weeks or so.

HTH,
Cherno Jagne
Halifax.

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