Some of you on the Clan mailing lists may have noticed a type of email virus is circulating through the Brotherhood right now. The message in the email starts with:

_"hi:

New shopping new life!

How are u doing these days?...."_

The "virus" will reply to all emails which are sent to you with that message, and will sometimes also forward it back to the sender. It seems to mostly effect only Gmail/Hotmail/MSN accounts.

*What causes this "virus": *

If you have a very insecure password (e.g. a dictionary word), there is a bot that will break your password and insert the quoted text above into both 1) Your email Signature, and 2) Your vacation responder. This way, even if you use an email client, the vacation responder will still apply and be responded to all incoming email.

How to fix this:

1) Change your password to something secure.

No less than 8-10 characters, always use numbers AND letters of both cases, you can even use symbols if you want. Remember that when it comes to passwords, simple = bad.

2) Remove your vacation responder and signature.

You’ll need to log in to the web-based version of your Gmail/MSN/Hotmail account to do this, even if you normally use an email client like Outlook or Mail.app. Go to your email settings and clear out all that junk that the bot put there.