ROY, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--While the flu season traditionally ends with the onset of spring, the computer virus season may just be heating up.

The week of March 26-April 1 marked the one year anniversary of when the Melissa virus first hit computer users. Melissa is considered by many as the most prolific computer virus ever. Last year, the FBI warned organizations to watch out for Melissa, prompting many companies to revert to paper rather than e-mail.

While the Melissa virus has faded away, other viruses have popped up to take its place. Yet, according to a recent survey conducted by Roper Starch Worldwide for Iomega Corporation (NYSE:IOM), 44 percent of computer users say they are not concerned about the problem of computer viruses. And when asked which virus is worse, 64 percent say a flu that knocks them off their feet for a week is worse than a computer virus that completely knocks out their data.

"This should be a wake-up call," said Germaine Ward, vice president, software solutions, Iomega Corporation. "While most people recover from the flu, computer users may never recover from a virus attack that causes them to lose their precious photographs, important e-mails or that report for work that's due on Monday. One way to protect your valuable computer data from viruses or hackers is to save it on a separate disk, such as a Zip disk, away from the hard drive."

Thanks to high-speed connections that make downloading large photo and music files easier, the sheer amount of data that people need to protect is increasing every day. A convenient alternative to saving data on standard 1.44MB floppy disks is to use superfloppy disks such as Iomega Zip(R) disks. Each Zip 100MB disk stores about as much information as 70 floppy disks, and Zip 250MB disks store about as much information as 170 floppies.

Survey interviews were conducted via telephone omnibus, February 10-13, 2000. A nationally representative sample of approximately 1,000 adult Americans was screened, and 671 respondents qualified as computer users to participate in the study. The data were weighted to correct any imbalances due to sampling. The margin of error for the entire sample of 671 computer users is plus or minus four percentage points. The margin of error for subgroups is higher.