Postcard virus hoax

By Joseph F. The one I got was this: Please!!! It appears to have been around for a couple years, but it keeps popping up now and again. A "hoax. Or that the conditions surrounding it is a hoax? I don't want to get that detailed. What I want is to stop these crazy things. For that, I need your help. Here's how to do it: -- First, have your security software up to date. The champions of repression and copyright protection had recently swung into action and killed the peer-to-peer version of Napster that was my main joy back then.

This seemed weird to me, I recall. How was anybody being hurt by me downloading year-old tracks that were nowhere available on CD or vinyl? Anyhow, that ship sailed, and Napster was shuttered, and I found myself on Kazaa. I had inputted the name "Van Morrison" into the search window and come up with a nice roster of tunes, selected them all and hit Enter. Then all hell broke loose.

I've never seen anything like it. My screen flipped to Outlook and a rolling torrent of messages began scrolling down my display like water over a sluice, e-mail being ejected from my outbox at a terrifying rate.

The outgoing messages all bore protestations of my love for the recipient, which I saw to my horror included the CEO, the President, the CFO and every vice president, executive vice president and senior executive vice president in the organization, as well as hordes of people I did not know. In six seconds I ascertained what had happened and turned off my computer. In that tenth of a minute, I later learned some 5, e-mails were delivered. The people who received them immediately knew two things: 1 I had been doing something I shouldn't have been doing on my computer that had nothing to do with company business and 2 I was a stupidhead who couldn't quietly manipulate his hardware without getting caught.

This virus simply writes zeros on the hard drive, where the vital information for the operation of the PC is kept. The virus activates in the following manner:. By the previous information, please, take precaution with the use of electronic mail and, of course, if you receive an email which you do not know the origin of, simply delete it without opening.

The one is not the same as the other, even though some of the attempts to fool people would present them as such. September saw the release of W32Heartworm. If you wish to keep the ecard longer, you may save it on your computer or take a print. Variations: Other subject lines used with this message include the following:. Synopsis: Computer viruses have been distributed through e-postcard notifications in the past, but current warnings of such viruses are generally outdated or outright hoaxes.

Sending out phony e-card notifications is therefore an effective method of camouflaging viruses and inducing unwitting recipients into clicking on links that install malicious programs onto their computers.

Generally, only unpatched Windows-based systems were vulnerable. However, although the fake greeting card or postcard lure for delivering viruses may be used again in the future, warnings like the ones referenced above are several years old and no longer pose any threat to computer users who have relatively up-to-date anti-virus software.