Re: **E-Mail Warning**

At 09:59 AM 8/18/97 +0100, Jon wrote:
>On the company net warnings have been issued regarding a nasty e-mail
virus.

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!!!!

Allan Goodall:	agoodall@sympatico.ca 
"You'll want to hear about my new obsession.
 I'm riding high upon a deep depression. 
 I'm only happy when it rains."    - Garbage