Please check out this information before you send on virus messages to others. There are many newbies (which some of you may be :-) out there that do not know any better than to pass on hoaxes and litter up the 'net with such junk mail. When in doubt, please do not forward virus warnings. There are more hoaxes than real warnings.

Copied from http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html

What to Do When You Receive a Warning

Upon receiving a warning, you should examine its PGP signature to see that it is from a real response team or antivirus organization.

To do so, you will need a copy of the PGP software and the public signature of the team that sent the message.

The CIAC signature is available at the CIAC home page. You can find the addresses of other response teams by connecting to the FIRST web page. If there is no PGP signature, see if the warning includes the name of the person submitting the original warning. Contact that person to see if he/she really wrote the warning and if he/she really touched the virus. If he/she is passing on a rumor or if the address of the person does not exist or if there is any questions about the authenticity or the warning, do not circulate it to others. Instead, send the warning to your computer security manager or incident response team and let them validate it. When in doubt, do not send it out to the world.

Your computer security managers and the incident response teams have experts who try to stay current on viruses and their warnings.

In addition, most anti-virus companies have a web page containing information about most known viruses and hoaxes. You can also call or check the web site of the company that produces the product that is supposed to contain the virus. Checking the PKWARE site for the current releases of PKZip would stop the circulation of the warning about PKZ300 since there is no released version 3 of PKZip. Another useful web site is the "Computer Virus Myths home page" which contains descriptions of several known hoaxes. In most cases, common sense would eliminate Internet hoaxes.