We've had a couple of reports of some people seeing virus alerts when plugging in mbeds. We've investigated this, and it is down to "Macafee Virus Scan" getting a false-positive.

The software reports it as the "fono.mp" virus, which is a boot sector based virus. In actual fact, it is picking up on the fact that we modified the USB Disk boot sector to say "Unplug your mbed Microcontroller" if a PC tried to boot off the mbed disk (rather than "Disk error, non-system disk", which isn't too helpful!). Turns out to be less than helpful if it makes people think they have a virus!

So, whilst there is no virus and you can continue to use as normal, we don't like it doing that! So the firmware update we released last week removed this modification. If you update the firmware, when you power-cycle the mbed the disk will be reformatted and all should be fine.

• /handbook/Firmware

We've only seen this on Macaffee, but updating to the new firmware gets some more improvements anyway so probably work doing if you haven't already.

Thanks for the reports and sorry for the shock that a few of you got! There is definitely no virus, and future versions will not have this problem.

Simon