Good Times Virus (Hoax)... Again!
By Jody Kravitz
Several of our readers have forwarded variants of the message below to me. One variant attributes the accuracy of the virus alert to the FCC! I almost cringe at the though of reprinting it, but I will, with the following caveat. Its a HOAX. Its one of the oldest Hoaxes on the Internet. The warning _IS_ the virus. By now the warning is probably wasting gigabytes of disk space around the globe, because people save the warning, and propogate it!!!
_PLEEEEEEEEEZ_ don't propgate this hoax.
> Subject: Internet Virus Notice
>
> For info / caution: There is a new computer virus being sent across the
> internet that is introduced through an email message titled"GOOD TIMES".
> Should you receive mail under this title, you should NOT download the file,
> OR if you have downloaded it, DO NOT READ IT! By opening the file you
> activate the virus which destroys the computer's hard drive.
>
> You may wish to send this message on.
>
Now my standard answer to those who have written in:
The "Good Times (E-mail) Virus" is a Hoax. The FCC (U.S. Federal
Communications Commision) would not issue such a warning, anyway.
There _IS_ an organization in the US involved with Internet
problems -- the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), who's
web page can be accessed as http://www.cert.org. I dont' think
they've worried too much about PC viruses.
For the record, the only E-mail virus I know of was a
virus which only affected NeXT brand computers. It involved
an imbedded "Display Postscript" program which took advantage
of the fact that the Display Postscript interpreter would
"execute" the file automatically, and as "root" (privileged).
It is always possible to obtain an "virus infection" by running
a program which arrives as an attachment to an e-mail message,
but this doesn't happen automatically when you read mail.
Jody |
(Message sent Fri 2 Aug 1996, 18:05:09 GMT, from time zone GMT.) |
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