A ROUGE email containing a computer virus caused chaos in Community First's Malvern office last week.

The message duplicated itself 7,000 times on 35 computers at the charity's Church Street building, creating a headache for staff who had only moved from their old offices at Malvern Station earlier in the month.

Community First's corporate resources officer Lucy Ottoway spent two days deleting the Outlook Express emails which jammed her colleagues hard drives.

She said: "Because we moved at the beginning of the month we got hit by the virus hard. It was very disruptive."

Ms Ottoway also warned of another email virus, SULFNBIC.EXE, which asks people to delete a programming file to prevent harm.

"You look to find the file on your system but it gets you to delete stuff from your C drive. It's a hoax. Once you delete the file you can't create long titles for files."