"But Gullotto said there's no reason a virus writer couldn't make the picture itself able to infect other computers." That's just silly. Pictures aren't executable files, don't carry any code, don't have any instructions. They're just data sets that are fed through a JPEG/GIF/whatever interpreter. One way you could make a JPEG file contaminate anything else (and pretty much the only way) would be to modify the JPEG-reading instructions in an application read a modified header, for example, that would carry virus-like code. Which would be quite a lot of trouble. Now, this virus is an actual executable program that looks for JPEG files - which is an entirely different situation. It's just like any virus out there in that you have to run it first. And server admins don't usually (unless someone's not very concerned about viruses) run executable files they receive by email. It's another virus alert blown out of proportion (I'm aiming this at CNN, not you, Misha) - just use common sense: don't open any attachments you don't expect, scan any files you download from peer-to-peer networks, etc etc, and your risks of infection are extremely low. I've never owned a virus scanner and only used one once, when I couldn't pinpoint a problem I was having (turned out to be one of my own programs that was the culprit.. heh) and I've never been infected in the 15+ years that I've used computers. My brother even had a rather huge virus collection at one time (easily over a thousand, including some scary ones from the old DOS days) sitting on floppies.. that was interesting. :) =DarkPen=