Beware of the Valentine virus

The "Vbs_Valentin.A" is likely to break out on Valentine's Day and spread chiefly through e-mails.

Chinese experts have warned computer users to guard against deadly viruses which could attack their machines on the eve of Valentine's Day.

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A virus, known as "Vbs_Valentin.A" is likely to break out on Valentine's Day and will spread chiefly through e-mails or on-line chat systems, according to China National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre under the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.

Other viruses like "Worm-blebla.B" and "VBS-ILoveyou" will also assault computers if users open e-mails or attachments disguised with Valentine blessings.

The computer virus centre cautioned users of being wary of unidentified e-mails, update anti-virus software and use the real-time computer virus monitoring function whenever surfing the Internet, Xinhua news agency reported.

Among other viruses to break out this week are "W97M-Concept.F", which will break out next Thursday. When users running Word documents, an infected computer will show a dialog box of "-Parasite Virus 1.0X Your computer is infected with the Parasite Virus, version 1.0."

The virus will substitute"." with ",", "and" with "not" and "a" with "e" in the computer's Word documents, experts said.