Forum Archive Index - December 2001

["Geoff Brown" <brownz@xtra.co.nz>]

Hi

here is a way hopefully to slow the spread of viruses...

 

As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer If it's an email type trojan 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 you 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 !000 (that's an exclamation mark followed by 3 zeros).
In the window below where it prompts you to enter the new email address, type in the word ......WORMALERT......, which of course, isn't a real email address.

Then complete everything by clicking add, enter, ok, etc.

Now, here's what you've done and why it works:

the "name" !000 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.

But when it tries to send itself to !000, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered (WormAlert). If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and your friends will not 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 Inbox almost immediately, same as when you type an incorrect address (mailer daemon etc).

Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to "WormAlert" could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it!

My learned friends (from Austnet irc's antivirus channel) and I have tested this thouroughly, and it works great with both outlook and outlook express. No guarantee about others, but there is a good chance it would work the same.

my prediction for the new year is that the Dow will fall to the 5000 level

The only shares to buy are gold shares...either out of AU or SA

because as the rise in gold will cause their currencies to rise as well

you tech chart people check out AVL in oz....

 

Have a merry Xmas

 

Geoff