On the company net warnings have been issued regarding a nasty e-mail
virus.
_DO NOT OPEN_ any e-mail you recieve that has the subject of "greetings
from your pen pal" or similar.
The virus will send its-self to all members of your e-mail address book
and then WIPE your HD...
Since a news group is more prone to this attack, and we are very international
in our subbers, I,m posting this 'off topic'. Especially as I've also recieved
microsofts wake up call!!
Jon (absolutely barking)I'm sure you know more about it than me and have
matters in hand.
Take care and type with a glove on ! (safe thrusting.. ;-)
Jon (T.C.)
Sprayforming Developments Ltd. [production tools]
made in
[prototype times]
'The future is now'
> At 09:59 AM 8/18/97 +0100, Jon wrote:
The virus warning you've sent out is a hoax. Here's the text of a message I
sent out to some people in one of my support departments from a similar hoax:
Hi, John.
As per our conversation today, the Penpal virus is, indeed, a hoax. It is a
variant on the Good Times virus hoax of a couple of years ago. There have been
a number of variants in the last few months. The most common is the Penpal
virus hoax, but another one that I've seen is the Deeyenda virus hoax.
It is physically impossible to infect your computer with a virus simply by
reading e-mail. The only way a computer can be infected is if you run a
program with a virus in it. The virus can be in the form of an EXE or COM file
in DOS, a DLL file in Windows, or an Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access
auto run macro (and these are just the common PC-type programs, and
doesn't include Unix, Mac, etc.).
However, e-mail can NOT infect your system. For an e-mail virus to read
your mailbox and mail itself out to people, it would have to work on ALL forms
of computers: IBM mainframes, Honeywell mainframes, Unix machines (in ALL the
flavours of Unix), DOS, Windows 95, Windows NT, Macintosh, OS/2, etc.,
etc.
It would also have to understand and recognize all the different e-mail
programs out there. In short, it can't happen!
In actuality, the warning message is a type of "virus." It is "spread" by well
meaning people who pass on the warning about this hoax virus. It eats up space
in every mailbox that contains the warning. If you add up all of the storage
space wasted by people warning other people about the virus, the collective
waste of space would be measured in gigabytes (if not more). In many ways,
this warning itself is probably the most successful computer virus ever!
If you want to hear it from the experts, there are a number of places on the
World Wide Web to check out. An excellent site is the Computer Virus Myths
site, at: http://kumite.com/myths/
I picked the following message off the CIAC web page. The CIAC is the
U.S.
Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability department. Their
web site, which has a lot of good computer virus information, is
located at: http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHome.html
PENPAL GREETINGS! Warning Hoax
The PENPAL GREETINGS! Hoax shown below appears to be an attempt to kill an
e-mail chain letter by claiming that it is a self starting Trojan that
destroys your hard drive and then sends copies of itself to everyone whose
address is in your mailbox. Reading an e-mail message does not run it
nor does it run any attachments, so this Trojan must be self starting. Aside
from the fact that a program cannot start itself, the Trojan would also have
to know about every different kind of e-mail program to be able to
forward copies of itself to other people. This warning is totally a hoax.
FYI!
Subject: Virus Alert
Importance: High If anyone receives mail entitled: PENPAL GREETINGS! please
delete it WITHOUT reading it. Below is a little explanation of the message,
and what it would do to your PC if you were to read the message. If you have
any questions or
concerns please contact SAF-IA Info Office on 697-5059.
This is a warning for all internet users - there is a dangerous
virus
propogating across the internet through an e-mail message entitled
"PENPAL GREETINGS!". DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANY MESSAGE ENTITLED "PENPAL GREETINGS!"
This message appears to be a friendly letter asking you if you are
interestedin a penpal, but by the time you read this letter, it is too late.
The "trojan horse" virus will have already infected the boot sector of your
hard drive, destroying all of the data present. It is a
self-replicating
virus, and once the message is read, it will AUTOMATICALLY forward itself to
anyone
who's e-mail address is present in YOUR mailbox!
This virus will DESTROY your hard drive, and holds the potential to DESTROY
the hard drive of anyone whose mail is in your inbox, and who's mail is in
their inbox, and so on. If this virus remains unchecked, it has the potential
to do a great deal of DAMAGE to computer networks worldwide!!!! Please, delete
the message entitled "PENPAL GREETINGS!" as soon as you see it! And pass this
message along to all of your friends and relatives, and the other readers of
the newsgroups and mailing lists which you are on, so that they are not hurt
by this dangerous virus!!!!