This is a public-interest archive. Personal data is pseudonymized and retained under GDPR Article 89.

Re: Fw: "Serious"

Hi Molly,

I hate to tell you this, but in sending out the message, you're 
actually propagating a virus.  Not an electronic one, but a social one.
Here's what Clay Shirky of panix.com (remember them from the TCP syn
attack on the news?) has to say:

   "Its for real. Its an opportunistic self-replicating email virus
   which tricks its host into replicating it, sometimes adding as many
   as 200,000 copies at a go. It works by finding hosts with defective
   parsing apparatus which prevents them from understanding that a piece
   of email which says there is an email virus and then asking them to
   remail the message to all their friends is the virus itself."

Anyhow, there's a FAQ available from the U.S. Department of Energy
Computer Incident Advisory Capability that covers the Good Times
"virus," AOL4FREE, modem tax hoax, etc...  Here's the URL:

   http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html

I'd worry more about your web browser than your email, given the rash
of security holes that have been discovered lately.  Make sure that
you have the latest and greatest Internet Explorer (previous versions
could run programs on your machine!) if that's what you use, and be
on the lookout for a new version of the Netscape Communicator suite
to fix the big JAVA bug that allows people to see which sites you've
been visiting, and maybe even what data has been sent to through
secure sites.

The world may be getting smaller, but it's not any less dangerous.  :)

Take care,

Chris
References:
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index