Is this true and correct?

[Gonzo]

Hi guys,

This email advising of a cunning way to protect one's address book is doing the rounds. For those of you in the know, is it accurate?


"How to protect your e-mail address book

A computer repairman says this is like having gold.
This is a good thing.
I learned a computer trick today that's really ingenious in its simplicity.

As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer
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 your address book
to spread further, and it will alert you to the factthat 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 'A'.

For the screen name or email 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.
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!

Pretty slick huh?

If everybody you know does this
then you need not ever worry about opening mail from friends.
DO IT NOW and pass this on to all your friends."

 

[Steve]

"If everybody you know does this
then you need not ever worry about opening mail from friends.
DO IT NOW and pass this on to all your friends."

That's usually a clue that it's a load of bollox.

 

[ovenpaa]

Heheheh - No chance! The spambots we deal with are highly sophisticated and seldom if ever use the local address book these days, mostly they import the user target list and spam away until asked to stop or forcibly stopped by the ISP

 

[Decster]

Pretty slick huh?

I cant imagine a 'worm' would pick the first address, send an email and wait to see if it is correct, before moving on to the next one.

It would just trawl through your pc doing what it was written to do. Create Havoc

A lot of emails will bounce back as not sent but the system will retry in 5 mins or whatever so it sounds like Bull....

oh and what ovenpaa says too

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

americans..............

 

[macpants]

This is very far from accurate. Firstly you need to separate viruses and worms. A worm is self replicating whereas a virus is not. Both these forms of malware can be otherwise described as exploits.

There are tens of thousands of different exploits out there in the wild. Very few of them will fire out through your contact list or address book. When they do however they do not know and cannot tell whether or not a response is received. Also, unless you have millions of contacts, the exploit will have run through your entire address book in a fraction of a second. Much quicker than any delivery failed server response. It simply will not know or care whether you get a response at all.

A worm (for that is what were talking about) will have been delivered to you normally by way of a trojan horse or simply trojan. This is simply a wrapper which wraps up as many exploits as the hacker wants to send you. The most worrying of these are the potential viruses that you get. A good well written virus will evade the best Anti Virus software you can buy and will hide itself on your computer in a manner that is virtually undetectable. In the first instance it will tell the happy hacker who you are and give him root access to your computer. Once he has that - the computer is his. He will then primarily be interested in all of your password and banking details.

I hope this hugely simplified account of malware helps you and your computer repair man. You really need to explain to him that he is completely wrong and could be doing a lot more harm than good by spreading poor advice. (He's not a hacker is he???) LOL

All the best.

 

[Gonzo]

Thanks for the replies chaps - not entirely surprising!

Not a "friend", rather one of thsoe irritating chain emails......

 

[judge]

Not a "friend", rather one of thsoe irritating chain emails......

That was another clue right there