OT Worm Virus Protection

[DTHOMSON]

I received this a few weeks ago and thought I would put it out her to see what anybody thought.

As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your E-mail 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 your 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 E-mail addresses. In the window where you would type your friend's first name, type in "A". For the screen name or E-mail address, type "[email protected]". Now, here's what you've done and why it works:

The "name" "A" 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 [email protected], it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered. 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 In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to [email protected] could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it!

[Jimmy Wakeford from Barefoot CNC]

Cool tipp

[Rat]

+1 Very Cool

[MATT Q]

That is a great tip thanks alot makes sense.

[Bullines]

quote:

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The "name" "A" 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 [email protected], it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered. 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

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If the worm included its own mail server engine ,like a bundled equivalent of sendmail, I could see it barfing on a returned message because of good programming practices like exception handling. However, since most virii/worms/malware is developed by script kiddies, they rarely have their own mail engine and I doubt most script kiddies are good programmers and test for failures. In some case, I see no reason. For example, I developed a mass emailer with Perl that sends out the mass emails from this forum as well as the In-House Solutions eNews (Canadian customers only). I loop through the list of addresses and make calls to sendmail on our ISPs server. I don't check for failures because I'd hate to hold up the mailing process. I'd update antivirus definitions and hide behind a firewall first. Make sense?

 

quote:

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Here's the second great advantage of this method: If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to [email protected] could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it!

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This would make sense

[Christian Raebild]

Most recent vira include their own SMTP engine, so the response to an undeliverable e-mail would be received by the virus' SMTP engine, not the user's mail client, and the virus' SMTP engine will ignore failures, it will just keep sending to all the addresses it has collected. And it is not just sending to the addresses in the address book, it is sending to all addresses it can find on the infected machine, in a lot of different types of files. These files include the HTML cache, which is why addresses that are posted on the web, such as the sales@ addresses of companies, receive a large number of virus e-mails.

 

That trick may have worked a long time ago, but it is useless now.

 

Sorry to be a spoilsport, but useless countermeasures are worse than no countermeasures.

[Ripper3785]

This is an "urban legend", so to speak. About the only thing it is good for is letting you know that you are infected by getting the returned email... It will not "stop the virus from spreading" once it unsuccessfully sends an email.

 

For more information, look at

 

this link at snopes

 

snopes.com is awesome. Run all your forwards through there, you may be surprised how many are BS.