Net Gains: Virus watchers

www.europe. datafellows.com/v-descs

Net Gains has, over the last week, received a warning from about a dozen different sources about a virus contained in an e-mail with the subject heading "It takes guts to say Jesus".

The warning comes with all the usual dire predictions about having your disk drive completely wiped.

For these types of threat, Data Fellows runs an excellent update page, outlining all the current viruses and virus hoaxes doing the rounds on the Internet.

The first thing to say about viruses is that they can never get onto your hard disk simply from being in the body of a text message. They can only be transmitted in some Microsoft Word documents and in attachments that you actually download and run on your machine.

One of the big advantages of Apple Macs is that they aren't susceptible to many of the viruses kicking about.

For further general information and programs dealing with Apple Macintosh viruses, the best place to head is probably an FTP site called ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info- mac/vir/, which, if you've never come across them before, is a repository for handy programs and text files.