El Poco

Text of this virus hoax reads as follows:

Hello, ATTENTION!! If you receive an email with a file "Flashmaster G", do NOT open this file. This message contains the virus "El Poco". Your hard disk will be erased immediately, but also can a whole network being disturbed. Send this email to as many people. It is a new, very malicious virus and only few people know about it. So send this mail to as many people as possible, friends, relations, to halt the spreading of the virus. The virus is very malicious and is as yet not to be recognised by any anti-virus program. So send this on. This is very important.

Many virus hoaxes:

• falsely claim to describe an extremely dangerous virus
• use pseudo-technical language to make impressive-sounding (but impossible) claims
• falsely claim that the report was issued or confirmed by a well-known company
• ask you to forward it to all your friends and colleagues

As usual, you are urged not to pass on warnings of this kind, as the continued re-forwarding of these hoaxes simply wastes time and email bandwidth.

It is possible that you may receive a hoax via email with a file attached. Obviously, such file attachments should be treated with caution as they may be virus infected. Sophos recommends deleting virus hoax emails, whether they contain file attachments or not.

Sophos suggests a policy to help prevent hoaxes from spreading in your company.