posted on January 6, 2003 07:58:35 PM new
No this isn't a new email virus. While reading my Home page from my ISP I came across this interesting article on Email virus.
Spot That E-Mail Virus
In case your anti-virus program doesn't catch every E-Mail based Internet worm, try the following tip to be warned if you are infected: Add a fake E-Mail address in your address book and name it with an obvious name (like !!virusalert!!) If you get infected, the message sent by the worm to that invalid E-Mail account will bounce back to you and you'll see the bounced message warning.
I don't know if it works but it might be worth a try.....
posted on January 6, 2003 09:16:19 PM new
THis is TOO long ... sorry but I copied/pasted .... go to www.snopes.com and typed "address book in the search.
Claim: Including a fake e-mail address of !0000 in your address book will prevent you from spreading any computer viruses you receive.
Status: Not necessarily.
Examples:
[Collected on the Internet, 2001]
Here's a little trick you can use to stop the spread of pc viruses...
Create a contact in your email address book with the name !0000 with no email address in the details. This contact will then show up as your first contact. If a virus attempts to do a "send all" on your contact list, your PC will pop up an error message saying that: "The Message could not be sent. One or more recipients do not have an e-mail address. Please check your address Book and make sure all the recipients have a valid e-mail address."
You click on OK and the offending (virus) message would not have be sent to anyone. Of course no changes have been made to your original contacts list. The offending (virus) message may then be automatically stored in your "Drafts" or "Outbox" folder. Go in there and delete the offending message. Problem is solved and virus will not spread.
[Collected on the Internet, 2002]
I learned a computer trick today that's really ingenious in it simplicity. As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus infecting all your friends and associates. This trick won't keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact, that the worm has gotten into your system.
Here's what you do: first, open your address book and click on "new contact" just as you would do if you were adding a new friend to your list of email addresses. In the window where you would type your friend's first name, type in AAAAAAA. In the window below where it prompts you to enter the new email address, type in [email protected] . Then complete everything by clicking add, enter, ok, etc.
Now, here's what you've done and why it works: The "name" AAAAAAA will be placed at the top of your address book as entry #1. This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your friends. But when it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered ([email protected]). If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and your friends will not be infected.
Here's the second great advantage of this method: If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your InBox almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to [email protected] could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it! Pretty slick huh?
If everybody you know does this then you needn't ever worry about opening mail from friends.
Pass this on to all your friends.
Origins: This "helpful" bit of advice first appeared on the Internet in mid-August 2001. It purports to offer an easy-to-implement solution to counter the ongoing travails visited upon those foolish enough to have opened virus-laden e-mails by disarming the virus' ability to spread to others disguised as legitimate mail from the duped user. According to the advice, netizens need only add a bogus !0000, 0000, or 10000 entry in their e-mail address books to create an effective "shark account" that will gobble up unauthorized mailings to the full book.
This trick will work somewhat, but it's not the panacea it's presented to be. Although the recommended action will help derail the spread of viruses designed to do a "send all," it will not counter the many that randomly select individual addresses from a user's address book or supplement addresses harvested from that location with those found cached elsewhere on the system. (This method also assumes that if the first entry in a list of recipients is invalid, the message won't be sent to any of the recipients -- this is not necessarily true of all e-mail programs.) Faked entry or not, those who correspond with users infected with those sorts of viruses will be just as vulnerable as they ever were.
Moreover, even those viruses whose spread has been halted via the ruse of a fake address book entry can still be doing damage to the infected user's system. Once an executable file has been opened and run, any virus it contains begins doing its dirty work. Part of that dirty work may amount to mailing itself to others, but if the virus is programmed to do more than just replicate itself via e-mail, it will still be present to wreak havoc on the infected computer. Deleting the infection-carrying e-mail will not halt whatever else may be underway.
Only a fool takes advice that amounts to altering anything on his own system without first fully understanding its nature. Though the current "helpful trick" is innocuous, there is no guarantee later versions will not circulate that instruct the credulous to do harm to their systems under the guise of helping them. Witness the May 2001 sulfnbk.exe hysteria where thousands of users geared to take whatever advice turned up in their inboxes were duped into deleting a key Windows operating system file from their home systems.
The best advice for countering viruses has always amounted to investing in good anti-virus software and using the product regularly to scan for infected files. Second best is a caution against running executable files sent in e-mail. Prurient or lustful curiousity often fuels the spread of those infections, as users who should by now know better open applications that promise videos of the McVeigh execution or naughty encounters featuring the latest media hotties.
posted on January 7, 2003 06:31:03 AM new
I didn't say anything about spreading a virus all it is is to detect a virus in your own system. They also say you should have an antivirus program. I would not have a computer without a program, but sometimes it doesn't work.
