On John Howard, Faulty Cylinders and Hoax Emails – Part IV
Continuing the series of hoax emails…[ Read Part 1 re. John Howard, Part 2 re. LPG Cylinders and Part III re 5% tax on NRIs here.
This “hoax email” is a tip to help “stop the spread of PC viruses”. It usually has the subject “!0000 Trick” or “How to protect your email address book”.
Read on:
*** Hoax Email Begins ***
…I learned a computer trick today that’s really ingenious in its 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 ‘ A’.
For the screen name or email address, type AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA
Now, here’s what you’ve done and why it works:
The ‘name ‘A’ 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.
When it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered. If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and none of your friends will 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 In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA 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 need not ever worry about opening mail from friends.
DO IT NOW and pass this on to all your friends.
*** The Reality ***
Courtesy !0000 Trick
…The misguided email outlines an alleged trick to prevent mass-mailing email worms from sending from your computer. This seemingly easy tip involves adding the bogus contact “!0000” to the Windows Address Book (or AAAA@AAAA.com or some such variant). The premise is that when the virus tries to send itself out to everyone in the address book, the mail client will falter on the bogus address and the attempt to send will fail. Of course, this assumes the virus intends to do a “send all” from the mail client in the first place.
Most of the modern day viruses prefer to randomly select individual addresses or supplement the addresses with those found cached on the system. In fact, most of the new viruses bypass the mail client altogether and use their own SMTP engine to send their viral email. In other words, the tip will only be effective in limited cases. What the tip can do effectively is lead to a false sense of security, and that can sometimes be worse than doing nothing at all.
Even more alarming, the original version of the !0000 tip further self-destructs as it supplements its instructions with the tip to use the email address “!0000@novirus.com” for the !0000 contact. The moment an email address is included with the contact, the entire tip fails under any scenario. The end result would be that a virus, doing a send all, would go out to every address in contacts with the exception of the !0000@novirus.com address which would be undeliverable.
As always, please be careful of what you read on the vast world-wide-web.
Related Posts:
5% Tax on NRIs: The Hoax Emails Series – Part III
Recent Comments