This is an informational message of general e-mail rather than workforce 
education interest.  If you have recently been receiving unanticipated 
e-mails in languages other than English from sources you don't recognize, 
this will be of interest to you.  I have received over 50 today, and this 
information comes via me from the tech person at the Center for Literacy 
Studies at the University of Tennessee in response to my query to him:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is a new variant of the Sober-P virus circulating. More accurately,
Sober-Q is a worm, in that is spreads itself to machines previously infected
with Sober-P.

Sober-Q installs its own SMTP server and starts sending spam out to
addresses harvested from the infected computer's file system. These e-mails
are of a political nature and are generally characterized as "right wing
hate spam."

If your anti-virus software is up to date, your windows updates are
up-to-date, and you have not clicked on any unexpected attachments recently,
you should not have any problems with your machine.

There are two side effects of this virus that can affect you, however. The
first is that you will probably see a sharp increase in German language
spam.

The second is that it "spoofs" the source address of the e-mail. That is,
someone out there has an infection, AND they have your e-mail address on
their computer. Their infected computer selects your e-mail address at
random and pretends to be you, and sends out this spam.
The bottom line of all of this is that our routine security precautions here
should prevent any problem from taking root.

[This information is for those who use McAfee virus protection.]
If you want to confirm that your anti-virus protection is up to date,
right-click on the McAfee shield in your system tray and select "About Virus
Scan Enterprise. This will give you a pop-up box. The Created On: date for
your virus definitions should be May 16, 2005. If it is not, right click on
the shield again and select "update now."
[If you use a different virus protection, run a virus update for that program.]

To confirm that your Windows updates are up to date, open Internet Explorer 
and the pull-down menu under "Tools",
and go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and follow the directions under
"Express Install."


Donna JG Brian
Moderator, NIFL Workplace Literacy Discussion List, and
Coordinator/Developer LINCS Workforce Education Special Collection at 
http://worklink.coe.utk.edu/
Center for Literacy Studies at The University of Tennessee
600 Henley Street, Suite 312
Knoxville, TN 37996-4135

865-974-3420 (desk phone) FAX 865-974-3857
djgbrian at utk.edu