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My mom got this funny email about a virus...haha

NusuniAdmin

NusuniAdmin

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 19, 2003
870
1
This is a FUNNY FUNNY messege she got. It claims to be from an IBM represenative and it tells you to never open a messege with a subject of "It takes guts to say jesus". Heres a quote:

PASS THIS ON TO ANYONE YOU HAVE AN E-MAIL ADDRESS FOR.

If you receive an email titled: "It Takes Guts to Say Jesus"
DO NOT OPEN IT. It will erase everything on your hard drive. This
information was announced yesterday morning from IBM; AOL states that
this is a very dangerous virus, much worse than "Melissa," and that
there is NO Remedy for it at this time.
Some very sick individual has succeeded in using the reformat function
from Norton Utilities causing it to completely erase all documents on
the hard drive.
It has been designed to work with Netscape Navigator and Microsoft
Internet Explorer.
It destroys Macintosh and IBM compatible computers.

This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it.
Pass this warning along to EVERYONE in your address book ! and please
share it with all your online friends ASAP so that this threat maybe
stopped.

Please practice cautionary measures and tell anyone that may have access
to your computer. Forward this warning to everyone that you know that
might access the Internet.
Click to expand...

funny funny fake email rumors haha. If you search for this on google you get all sorts of forums about it, some from 2003. This is comical.....i almost fell off my chair hahahahahaha.
 
What kills me is that people will forward this message around. All it does is give spammers valid email addresses to send to. Somehow, the spammers code the email to report back email addresses the email has been sent to. Wish I knew more about it so I could block similar code...
 
The problem is when people forward it to 50 people at once, and put all the address in the To or CC fields, instead of the BCC field. Each of those people send to another 50 people and BAM! 2500 addresses for the spammers to use.
 
yellow said:
Sounds fantastic!! But sadly, that is not true.
Click to expand...

Sadly, it is true. I didn't think so either. But back in '97, my sister forwarded me this email, and we got to replying back and forth on this particular message. She had mentioned she heard people could obtain your email address from this, and I disagreed thinking it wasn't possible. Lo and behold, someone out of the blue responds to both of us with all of our replies stating he'd been watching all along.

Could be just an HTML thing. By converting everything to text that could be avoided, but I'm not so sure...
 
Seriously, it is not true.

In order for an email to do this, it would have to carry an executable application/script. It would have to parse out the fields and extract email addresses. Then it would have to somehow send that information back to the originator undetected. In order for all this to happen, the user would have to actually run the script, or use some piece of junk like Outlook, that runs any attached executables for you, which is why so many PCs get infected with email borne viruses.

Emails cannot change on their own while being transfered from one user to another. This is simply not possible with text or HTML emails. The only way it MAYBE could happen is with an attached executable, which again must be run in order to work. But it cannot change an existing email in your inbox.

Using HTML graphics in emails can tell a spammer what IP you loaded them from, and possibly what email address he was using to spam to. If the email was properly crafted by the spammer to include some sort of identifying information in the given links, they could be told which addresses were legit by the people following the links or loading the graphics. But this is present in the email when it gets sent.

For example, this link from a real spam I got:

<A href=3d"http://enomypotkasi=2eorg/66d7fd5cafda26266b94340f8/6bABv/H4cC=
PwEQJxAHBgF8DUrDFw0HQDFKEg=3d=3d=2ehtm" target=3d"quadrangles">
Click to expand...

Quite unusual looking, right? I suspect that it is used as a unique identifier to the spammer, if I were to follow that link, they would have confirmation that yellow@foo.whatever is a valid address to spam to.
 
Do any of you remember a while back about some AOL employee getting fired for spamming people (or somtin like that)?
 
NusuniAdmin said:
Do any of you remember a while back about some AOL employee getting fired for spamming people (or somtin like that)?
Click to expand...

He was arrested because he stole some of the client files before he was fired and sold them to an internet gambling business, which assuredly uses spamming techniques.

From SANS News Bites Vol. 6 Num. 26

--AOL Employee Arrested for Alleged Theft of 92 Million Screen Names
(24 June 2004)
Jason Smathers, a software engineer working for America Online, has been
arrested on charges he broke into the ISP's computer database and stole
92 million customer e-mail addresses which were later sold to spammers.
Smathers allegedly used the identification code belonging to another AOL
employee to access the data he allegedly stole; his employment duties
did not give him access to the customer data. Smathers also allegedly
sold the list of names to Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas, who runs an
Internet gambling business. Dunaway has also been arrested; both men
face maximum prison sentences of five years and $250,000 fines.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A860-2004Jun23?language=printer
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/technology/24spam.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5279826/
Click to expand...
 
yellow said:
He was arrested because he stole some of the client files before he was fired and sold them to an internet gambling business, which assuredly uses spamming techniques.

From SANS News Bites Vol. 6 Num. 26
Click to expand...

ok thnx
 
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