Virus Warning

[K_S]

Hi All

I have no idea if the message below is correct; but what do you do when you get a message like this.

URGENT !!!
PLEASE INFORM EVERYONE
Emails with pictures of Osama Bin-Laden hanged are being sent and the
moment that you open these emails your computer will crash and you will
not be able to fix it!
If you get an email along the lines of 'Osama Bin Laden Captured'
or 'Osama Hanged' don't open the attachment.
This e-mail is being distributed through countries around the globe, but
mainly in the US and Israel .
Be considerate & send this warning to whomever you know.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS:
You should be alert during the next few days:
Do not open any message with an attached file called
'Invitation' regardless of who sent it.This includes any
greetings from a friend or
classmate, etc.
It is a virus that opens an Olympic Torch which 'burns' the whole hard
disc of your computer.
This virus will be received from someone who has your e-mail address in
his/her contact list, that is why you should send this e-mail to all your contacts.
It is better to receive this message 25 times than to receive the virus
and open it.
If you receive a mail called 'invitation', though sent by a friend, do not open it and shut down your computer immediately.
This is the worst virus announced by CNN, it has been classified by
Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever.
This virus was discovered by McAfee yesterday, and there is no repair
yet for this kind of virus.
This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the
vital information is kept.
SEND THIS E-MAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW

[silentC]

what do you do when you get a message like this
Delete it!

Mate, that's an example of a virus warning hoax. The idea is to get as many people to send it to as many other people as possible. Why? Stuffed if I know - clogs up people's in-boxes with junk, causes headaches for system admins, generally wastes other people's time. I don't know what benefit anyone would get out of it, other than perhaps a kick out of seeing it get passed around the world over night.

See, you and I have just both wasted precious minutes over it and added a few more bytes to the storage space and bandwidth consumed by it :)

[K_S]

Delete it!

Mate, that's an example of a virus warning hoax. The idea is to get as many people to send it to as many other people as possible. Why? Stuffed if I know - clogs up people's in-boxes with junk, causes headaches for system admins, generally wastes other people's time. I don't know what benefit anyone would get out of it, other than perhaps a kick out of seeing it get passed around the world over night.

See, you and I have just both wasted precious minutes over it and added a few more bytes to the storage space and bandwidth consumed by it :)


Gday SC

I guess your position is clear, but I was thinking of STEGANOGRAPHY when I passed it on.

[pawnhead]

Warning:

If you receive an email entitled "Badtimes," delete it immediately. Do
not open it. Apparently this one is pretty nasty. It will not only erase
everything on your hard drive, but it will also delete anything on disks
within 20 feet of your computer. It demagnetizes the stripes on ALL of
your credit cards. It reprograms your ATM access code, screws up the
tracking on your VCR and uses subspace field harmonics to scratch any
CD's you attempt to play. It will program your phone auto dial to call
only 900 numbers. This virus will mix antifreeze into your fish tank.
It will drink ALL your beer.

FOR GOD'S SAKE, ARE YOU LISTENING?! ! ! !

It will leave dirty underwear on the coffee table when you are expecting
company. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with
Rogaine, all the while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your
back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your Visa card.
It will cause you to run with scissors and throw things in a way that is
only fun until someone loses an eye. It will rewrite your backup files,
changing all your active verbs to passive tense and incorporating
undetectable misspellings which grossly change the interpretations of key
sentences.
If the "Badtimes" message is opened in a Windows 95/98 environment, it
will leave the toilet seat up and leave your hair dryer plugged in
dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will not only remove the
forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, it will also refill
your skim milk with whole milk.

**WARN AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN. ** And if you don't send this to 5000
people in 20 seconds you'll fart so hard that your right leg will spasm,
shoot straight out in front of you, sending sparks that will ignite onto
the person nearest you.

Send to everyone ..... In case you are a blonde, this is a joke.

[silentC]

I guess your position is clear, but I was thinking of STEGANOGRAPHY when I passed it on.
In that case, you've not only wasted bandwidth, you've also possibly aided terrorists by passing it on!

[Honorary Bloke]

Gday SC

I guess your position is clear, but I was thinking of STEGANOGRAPHY when I passed it on.

Well, then, you're just silly. :wink:

[K_S]

We must be on different planets - I qualified the message to seek informed opinion about such messages. There is no way it does anything else.

[silentC]

Yes we may be, because I'm having a great deal of difficulty following you mate.

Your question was "what do you do when you get a message like this" and my answer was "delete it", to which you replied "I was thinking of STEGANOGRAPHY when I passed it on". I have to admit I had to look that up but it appears to be the technique of hiding messages within other seemingly unrelated or innocent messages - a technique purportedly used by terrorists to exchange information - hence my tongue in cheek remark (I don't really think you have aided terrorists). Now you're saying you don't believe there is any more to the message than meets the eye (or I think that's what you're saying), so now we are back to the fact that it's a hoax email intended to clog up mail servers with irrelevant rubbish and the best thing to do with them is, as I first suggested, delete them.

I get these sent to me often by friends and if I really want to know if it's legitimate or not, I just Google a key phrase from it and it's likely that it will come up on the snopes.com site or similar with an analysis concerning it's legitimacy or otherwise, so if you really want to clarify something like this, then that's another suggestion for you.

However I think in this case the author of the hoax has achieved his or her goal :)

[silentC]

Here you go: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/o/osama.htm

[K_S]

Here you go: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/o/osama.htm


Thanks SC

We can all learn something each day, that's why I put it up. I was surprised at the tone of HB's response.

Let's mark this - over and out