Bogus virus alerts



Q Below is the latest message to be doing the rounds that warns of doom and gloom to anyone who opens a message entitled "Join the Crew". I have read in your magazine (great reading, by the way!) that these "destructive" messages are usually fake and cannot harm your machine in any way. Is this always the case? Is there any way that damage can be done simply by opening an e-mail message? I am of the understanding that an e-mail message is simply a text message and that only a rogue attachment (such as an .exe file) can do damage if activated. Could you please clarify this for me (and others) once and for all?
PS: It seems to me the best way for anyone to get a large amount of people to open a message would be to set the subject heading to "Virus Alert"! It's a novel form of "chain-letter"!
"WARNING! WARNING!
If you receive an e-mail titled "JOIN THE CREW", DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT open it!!! It will erase everything on your hard drive!!! 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 information was received yesterday morning from IBM; 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. Also, DO NOT open or even look at any mail that says, "RETURNED OR UNABLE TO DELIVER" This virus will attach itself to your computer components and render them useless. Immediately delete any mail items that say this. AOL has said that this is a very dangerous virus and that there is NO remedy for it at this time. Please practise cautionary measures and forward this to all your online friends ASAP!!!"
- Derek Langsford

A In my view, vendors of antivirus products are partly responsible for the spread of virus hoaxes such as "Join the crew". Their advertising campaigns -- with their dark, menacing shadows and demonic cartoon characters chomping their way through hard disks -- are clearly intended to frighten rather than inform. Creators of hoaxes such as "Join the crew" exploit the resulting paranoia to flood the world's mail servers with megabytes of junk mail -- all without writing a single line of malicious code!
As Derek suggests, because e-mail messages are composed entirely of text, they cannot transmit viruses. File attachments are a different matter, but there's no way to catch a virus simply by opening an e-mail message.
"Join the crew" has been doing the rounds for a while now. Another one to watch for is the Good Times "virus", which -- according to its author -- is possessed of awesome destructive power: "If [your] computer contains a hard drive, that will most likely be destroyed." Destroyed?! Better have a fire extinguisher ready. But read on -- it gets worse: "If the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop -- which can severely damage the processor if left running that way too long." This is utterly meaningless, but it sounds scary as hell, doesn't it? Don't be fooled!
For an up-to-date list of virus hoaxes, check out http://www.mcafee.com/support/hoax.asp.
- Neville Clarkson


Category: Viruses
Issue: Feb 1998
Pages: 150-152

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