In your column of 1st May 2000 you answered a question from Richard C. regarding the Trojan virus. Co-incidentally, that day I received an email from a friend to whom I had forwarded a cartoon attachment to say that her anti-virus program had notified her the attachment I sent had a “PWSteal.Trojan”. That attachment had been sent to me from another friend and our anti-virus programs did not pick it up. We both use Symantec Norton Anti-virus and had recently updated online. I followed your suggestion and downloaded “The Cleaner” from www.moosoft.com, scanned the computer and it did not find anything. Then I downloaded “InnoculateIT”, but have not installed it because the instructions said it should not be installed if there is already an anti-virus program loaded on the computer. What should I do? Is it possible that a Trojan virus could have been passed through two computers (at least) and only picked up by a third? Is it the anti-virus program we use that is the problem here? My operating system is Windows 98. Hope you can help!

I do not recommend that you install InnoculateIT. If you are running Symantec or Norton with the most updated virus definition lists then you should be safe. It is possible for viruses to attach themselves to outbound emails.. The PWSteal.Trojan is a virus which steals passwords from your computer (eg. internet logon, email, and any Windows cached passwords) and forwards them onto an anonymous email address. I did some looking on the internet for this virus and it is known that Norton AntiVirus definitions dated December 27, 1999 incorrectly diagnosed some Shockwave files as being infected. You can find more information on this at: www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/pwsteal.trojan.html. I suggest that you find out what virus scanner your friend is using and whether the virus definition files have been updated lately. If not, ask them to update the virus definition files and then re-scan the file you send them. If you scan the file yourself and it doesn’t bring up any problems (assuming you are using the most up to date virus definition files) you should be OK.