[Daryn Kagan, Cnn Anchor:] We are going to start today with yet another new computer bug that is out there, it is biting its way through computers this morning. And Internet users, the warning is out for you. Experts say this new virus is smarter and even more destructive than the virus from a couple of weeks ago, called the "Love Bug." CNN's technology correspondent Rick Lockridge joins us now, he has more on this new computer bug. Rick, good morning.
[Rick Lockridge, Cnn Technology Correspondent:] Good morning. And I think we should take a moment right now to contemplate just how lucky we are that this happened now instead of before the "Love Bug." Because this worm is much more destructive and it's much stealthier than the other one. If this one had hit first we would be having a real crisis. The "Love Bug" was bad enough, but I think there would be an awful lot of people around the world and certainly in this building, whose computers would be sleeping with the fishes this morning if this one had hit first. Let's show you what to look out for. First of all, when you open up Outlook, and it's only on Microsoft Outlook, if that's the e-mail program you use, you open it up. And you see one of these: a little paper clip icon, you know you have a mail with an attachment. Now I've sent this one to myself, this is a simulation, this is not the real worm. So you open it up and on the subject line here's another give away. It will have "fw," as in forward, somewhere on the subject line. So, so far, I know I could be at risk. Now I look down to see what the attachment was, and I see that the attachment name is something that the the worm has gone into my computer and taken a word out at random that I already had in my e-mails somewhere. We deal with a lot of scripts here, so it's picked the world "script" and it has attached this suffix ".vbs." That's very important, if you see.vbs then you know it could be the worm. Now if I were to double click on this, which I'm not going to because you shouldn't, and it were to happen to be the worm, then what would happen next would be: it would go into my computer; it would e- mail copies of itself, changing the name in every instance, to everybody in my Microsoft Outlook address book; then in would go into my computer or my system, if I was connected to a network as I am here, and it would rename all of my files after itself and reduce the size of every one of those files to zero bytes. Meaning it would erase, effectively erase all of my files, I would have nothing left on computer except the files that were open at the time I double clicked. And I would have to go all the way back to square one and reinstall Windows and I would lose everything else on my computer in the process. So if I were to see something like this and I didn't know that it was just some simulation that I put up for you, I would go right up here to this very important X icon in Microsoft Outlook, which is where you should always head when you get an attachment you're uncertain about. And I'll hit it, and I'll delete that file. And then it will go into the deleted files folder and I can go back and further delete it if I wanted to. But for me, I know that I'm pretty safe at this point. So you want to take those steps to find out if you've got it and then you want to delete it Daryn.
[Kagan:] Rick, I know after the "Love Bug" a lot of folks went out and they got one of those anticomputer or, I mean, antivirus programs. Is that going to help in this case?
[Lockridge:] Well, you should have, of course, antivirus software already installed. If you had one on your computer, it would not necessarily have picked up this one. So you should go to one of a number of sites, Symantec among several others, and you should look for latest version of their software which you can download, in most cases, for free. And it will help identify whether you have one of those culprits somewhere on your hard disk. Rick Lockridge, thanks for all the words of warning. We will be very careful and just go for the delete, the big X. Thank you.