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Don't Catch a Virus
2 July 2001

In the last month, agents have been calling us with all their problems. Well not quite all their worries and woes, the phone would never stop ringing, but their technology problems to be specific. This is because Genesys is trialling ABTA's IT Helpline.

One encouraging fact we are discovering is that many travel agents are now connected to the Internet, happily sending and receiving emails to and from their customers and suppliers. Of course, all those now online are vulnerable to virus attacks but, worringly, many agents are not fully aware of how to ward-off attacks. (No, a clove of garlic will not help!)

Take one travel agent that called the other day. They were pretty sure their PCs had been infected and it turned out they were, unfortunately, right. Their machines had been infected by VBS.VBSWG2.X@mm. It sends itself to all recipients in an infected user's Microsoft Outlook address book. It also has a payload that opens a Web site that contains pornographic contents. The email reads:

Subject: Homepage
Message: Hi! You've got to see this page! It's really cool ;O)
Attachment: Homepage.HTML.vbs

A seemingly innocuous email and, luckily, the virus was not too damaging, but the two Directors of this agency had to cancel all meetings that day and had to concentrate on virtually nothing else but finding out how to eradicate the virus. A terrible waste of time.

Yet there are a couple of simple commonsense safeguards one can take, which once one understands them, are no more complicated than locking the shop door at night. If they and their staff had known them, they would have saved a lot of wasted time and energy. You might already be virus aware but, if not, read on.
Most viruses arrive by email and most are file attachments. So Rule No.1. Be extremely wary of email attachments. If you are not expecting an attachment from someone and if the subject of the email is not one you have been discussing, then think carefully before opening. If the attachment's file name ends in a common extension such as .doc, .rtf, .pdf then it is probably OK. If it ends in .vbs, .exe or anything else you do not understand, do not click on the attachment, just delete the email. If you know the person who sent the email and you are unsure whether to open it, why not email them to confirm that the meant to send an attachment?

Rule No.2. Run anti-virus software on your PCs and keep it up to date. My travel agent friends with the virus could not understand why their anti-virus software had not blocked it. Their software was old, they had bought it four weeks previously and not updated it. It might well have been sitting on a shop shelf for six months and so could have been hopelessly out of date. You really need to update your anti-virus software weekly. This is usually done by going to the supplier's Web site, downloading the latest update and then installing it.

Just sticking to these two rules will keep you pretty safe, but remember, as Mad Eye Moody says in Harry Potter 4, "CONSTANT VIGILANCE."   What? You have not read the book, yet?

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