At 05:00 PM 4/14/97 -0600, Ing E Palomar Lever wrote:
>To Ing E Palomar Lever <epalomar@roentgen.gdl.iteso.mx>
>Via an inexplicably circuitous route, I received your e-mail denouncing
>message-borne viruses as being a load of balls. I would dearly love to
>believe you, except for what happened to a colleague of mine only a few
>days ago.
>>"AOL4FREE.COM". [crap snipped]
>He just read the mail, and that's what happened.
No, you are wrong and misinformed, and probably a bit gullible.
Your friend is either being misunderstood by you, or you are
lying. This did _not_ happen to your friend, and I'll eat this
message if it did.
The following is email I just sent out today to someone who
included me on a CC list of several hundred people, talking
about the very text you claim was written "by your friend",
but which was reproduced word for word in the warning I
received from a different source. Hopefully this will
educate you and others about virus hoaxes:
>At 12:20 PM 4/14/97 -0800, Bill Dickerson wrote:
>>Mail*Link(r) SMTP virus warning
>>Am unsure of the significance or accuracy of this--but in the age-old custom
>>of "better safe than sorry. . ."
>>>>"AOL4FREE.COM".
>
>Actually, a better principle to follow in the case of virus
>warnings is "verify, verify, verify."
>
>What I like to tell people is -- unless you are an EXPERT in
>virus warnings, or you have received your information first
>hand from someone whom you can independently confirm is an
>expert, DON'T pass on a virus warning. (It's not enough to
>trust your immediate source as a person; you have to know
>that they haven't fallen trap to a hoax too.)
>
>These days there are countless numbers of "hoax viruses"
>drifting about the internet, and a lot of time, energy, and
>worry gets spent trying to deal with these chimeras.
>
>If you receive a virus warning via email -- no matter who
>it comes from -- you should first confirm the accuracy of
>that email.
>
>How?
>
>* Subscribe to the virus newsgroup (comp.virus, I believe,
> is it)
>
>or even easier:
>
>* Surf to a web page about viruses and look it up. If you
> don't find your virus listed there as a hoax or a real
> virus, send it on to the people who maintain the page and
> they'll be able to tell you if it's legit.
>
>VIRUS RESOURCES:
>
>I threw together a quick list of pages related to virus warnings;
>the first one to check out is Yahoo:
>
>http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Security_and_Encryption/Viruses/
>
>This has a bunch of useful links, including:
>
>http://www.ncsa.com/virus/ -- NCSA's Virus Tech Lab
>http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/ -- Symantec's anti-virus research
> center
>
>With regards to the "virus" in question here, I found the following
>pages at NCSA and Symantec that state it's a hoax:
>
>http://www.ncsa.com/virus/aol4free.html
>http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/data/aol4free.html
>
>IN CONCLUSION:
>
>This message is not meant to embarass Bill or anyone else --
>but rather to pass on some useful information about virus
>hoaxes, where to get definitive information, and what to do when
>you get one. In short: Don't pass it on unless you can verify
>it first.
>
>--Kynn Bartlett
> Idyll Mountain Internet
>
--
/\ /\ /\ /\ Kynn Bartlett / kynn@idyllmtn.com
/ \ / \/ \ / \ Idyll Mountain Internet
/ \ //\ /\ \ / \ <URL:http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn>
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