Computer viruses are one of the unforeseen byproducts of the information age.
Tiny programs written by pranksters, they can spread automatically from machine to machine, sometimes doing serious damage such as destroying data. The virus affects personal computers running Microsoft Word 97 or Microsoft Word 2000 and Microsoft's Outlook e-mail package. Because the virus is activated only when users open the attachments, computer security experts warn people not to open any attachment they do not expect to receive, and to use recent commercial anti-virus software that can block macro viruses. This file is coming from somebody you know and supposedly trust. It said yesterday that it had received reports of the virus hitting about 100,000 computers at 250 organizations and it assumed the total was much larger.