Oh, no! Another E-mail Virus!

E-mail Virus'

It's easy to believe the e-mail sitting in your inbox, but...

Ignore it (and all other messages like it) - it's a hoax designed to fill up mail boxes (for instance, at a university, most of the people with e-mail will send it to their friends at the same university, and end up clogging the university mail spool with many messages like this. Insidious, isn't it?)

This mail itself is the virus - it spreads through systems, filling up mail boxes and tending to fill small systems.

In reality, a virus that does such a thing doesn't exist. The closest you can get is a Word macro virus, which would only work if you're reading e-mail in Word, such as the virus a while back that Microsoft did mention on their site (unlike THIS "virus"!).

Virus' need to be executed, and reading an e-mail won't run a program. (And if it did, it would only work on one system - Mac programs don't run on PCs, don't run on UNIX, etc.)

It's easy to believe messages like this, because they seem to be speaking from a knowledgeable stance, but there are some things that you can pick out to show that it's fake:

>> > > If you receive an e-mail entitled "WIN A HOLIDAY"
>> > > DO NOT open it. It will erase everything on your hard drive.

After a while, you'll get to see many of these, with different tiles (like the one about "Pen Pals"), but the rest of the e-mail is exactly the same...

This, though, you can only spot from getting lots of these things... I've seen many of these warnings, but never one e-mail with the titles that they've listed in the "warning".

>> > > Forward this letter out to as many people as you can.
>> > > This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know
>> > > about it.

This is the part that helps spread the _real_ virus - it tells you to spread this e-mail to as many people as possible ....

And it also tells you that "This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it." But it's their own message that's the malicious "virus".

The creators of this hoax probably thought that this was pretty funny.

>> > > This information was announced yesterday morning from Microsoft;

Here's the telling part - "announced yesterday morning from Microsoft". If this was true, Microsoft would have a page talking about the virus, as they put all of their press releases on the page.

But it _sounds_ official, and not many people would think to check it.

But you notice that there's not a date? And it doesn't mention who the spokesman was? Nor does it tell you the address to check out the Microsoft web page where this announcement can be found?

(Other of these "warnings" mention other sites, yet the same thing goes - on the site, there is no info, and again there is no date, name of spokesman, etc.)

>> > > please share it with everyone that might access the internet.
>> > > Once again, pass this along to everyone in your address book so
>> > > that this may be stopped.

And again, they're trying to get everyone to spread their own virus around.

So, hopefully you'll know for the future how to spot hoaxes of this sort on the internet, and we can put a stop to spreading this hoax any further! ^_^

Delete the e-mail - stop the spread of that particular "virus"!

Check out http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html for a huge listing of those fake virus warnings.

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PS - One favour I do ask, please e-mail your comments about the articles to kunoichi@thekeep.org because it's your comments that keep me writing! Oh, and can you check out my other articles?

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© Caroline Seawright 2000