...people unleash unqualified fear and paranoia on the net, particularly when its in the name of hawking their own products.  It's really a pet peeve I suppose.  I just can't stand it when people think that they understand what they have heard or read and in turn, misrepresent a potentially threatening situation.  It's dangerous and irresponsible.

Case in point.

...infected, don't make plans for using your computer. It will be otherwise engaged during the attack, April 22 through 28. Experts say two things make Netsky-V especially dangerous:

- Just a single click of an email message unleashes the worm, and;
- It downloads itself from other victims, instead of hard coded sites.

So. How do you avoid this disaster? Insist that users apply the current patches for Microsoft Outlook. Update your antivirus. And….

Ok…first of all, this is not necessarily true.  Based on this assessment, the assumed default behavior of Outlook is to automatically execute an attachment when an E-Mail is opened.  I've been using computers for quite a long time and have never seen this happen.  This isn't the case with Outlook 2000, XP or Outlook 2003.

When you open an E-Mail in one of those clients, the e-mail simply opens and displays the text in the body of the message.  That's it.  Now, if you double click (or in some instances single click) on the attachment, then you are at the mercy of Darwinism and I wish you well.  But the truth is that e-mail clients don't attack people…e-mail readers who aren't familiar with their technology who click on things that they don't know about, do.  For the record, the same goes for web based e-mail with attachments.  Attachments will NEVER open themselves automatically.  NEVER.  Embedded objects can, but that's not what we're talking about here.

After all that, if you find that you do have the virus, here is some additional information on it, and how to remove it.

In the end, when we make statements like this, can we please qualify things before sounding the general alarm.  Jeeeeezz.