In the early hours of Wednesday May 9, at 00:30 GMT, Sophos issued an email alert to its customers regarding the VBS/VBSWG-X worm (also known as the Homepage worm).
Sophos technical support have received a number of calls from users of the McAfee anti-virus program claiming that our email alerts (and even a subsequent press release) were infected by the virus (which McAfee called VBS/VBSWG.gen@mm).
Sophos would like to reassure its customers that it did not send out a virus.
McAfee has confirmed to Sophos that some versions of their product have a tendency to false alarm on entirely innocent virus descriptions (for instance, descriptions of viruses which use the phrase "VBSWG" and quote a filename with a double extension).
As this has caused considerable confusion, Sophos recommends affected users contact Network Associates technical support for help.
McAfee has said that this problem should be fixed in their 4138 DAT files.
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