INTERNET VIRUS HOAXES
These computer virus hoaxes are actually contained on the info pages of Symantec
and other anti-virus makers. That anyone would believe the following are real goes to show that
1)people are very dumb and 2)people have lost their sense of humor.
There are some basic facts about email, what it can and cannot do. To actually get a file, you need
to download it as a program (such as one attached to your email) or an infected document.
I remember one website that used the status bar scroller trick (something considered quite tacky)
to panic visitors into thinking that a program was being installed in the background on their computers.
It was quite clever, I have to admit. I can just picture the fear that some people had when
"Downloading....5%.....10%....%15....installing....updating registry...." scrolled in their browser.
I've also seen the same done with an animated gif meant to mimic an installation box. (I think I saved it somewhere...)
These hoaxes are so well-written, particularly the first, that only the extremely dense would
think they were at risk. Like most hoaxes, these ones are telling of people's fears and anxiety.
I guess I should be too quick to judge; in January, 1999, I was struck by
Happy99.exe. Usually I delete any .exe's I get. But for some reason, I ran the damn thing (it came from
an English book seller!) and I was quite puzzled when a Mac using friend asked what the hell
I was sending him. Ah well...fortunately it was extremely easy to get rid of.
The Pluperfect Virus By Bob Hirschfeld
A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it
is far more insidious than last week's Chernobyl menace. Named
Strunkenwhite after the authors of a classic guide to good
writing, it returns e-mail messages that have grammatical or
spelling errors. It is deadly accurate in its detection abilities,
unlike the dubious spell checkers that come with word
processing programs.
The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout
corporate America, which has become used to the typos,
misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in
cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup,
said the virus has endered him helpless. "Each time I tried to
send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error
message: 'Your dependent clause preceding your independent
clause must be set off By commas, but one must not precede the
conjunction.' I threw my laptop across the room."
A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance
company, 10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the
same damned e-mail kept coming back to me with a pesky
notation claiming I needed to use a pronoun's possessive case
before a gerund. With the number of e-mails I crank out each
day, who has time for proper grammar? Whoever created this
virus should have their programming fingers broken." A broker at
Begg, Barow and Steel said he couldn't return to the "bad, old"
days when he had to send paper memos in proper English. He
speculated that the hacker who created Strunken white was a
"disgruntled English major who couldn't make it on a trading
floor. When you're buying and selling on margin, I don't think it's
anybody's business if I write that 'i meetinged through the
morning, then cinched the deal on the cel phone while bareling
down the xway.' "
If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the
end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant
timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J.,
found that e-mail increased employees' productivity by 1.8 hours
a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts.
(The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of
productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their
spouses, parents and stockbrokers.) Strunkenwhite is
particularly difficult to detect because it doesn't come as an
e-mail attachment (which requires the recipient to open it before
it becomes active). Instead, it is disguised within the text of an
e-mail entitled "Congratulations on your pay raise." The message
asks the recipient to "click here to find out about how your raise
effects your pension." The use of "effects" rather than the
grammatically correct "affects" appears to be an inside joke from
Strunkenwhite's mischievous creator.
The virus also has left government e-mail systems in disarray.
Officials at the Office of Management and Budget can no longer
transmit electronic versions of federal regulations because their
highly technical language seems to run afoul of Strunkenwhite's
dictum that "vigorous writing is concise." The White House
speechwriting office reported that it had received the same
message, along with a caution to avoid phrases such as "the truth
is. . ." and "in fact. . . ." Home computer users also are reporting
snafus, although an e-mailer who used the word "snafu" said she
had come to regret it. The virus can have an even more
devastating impact if it infects an entire network. A cable news
operation was forced to shut down its computer system for
several hours when it discovered that Strunkenwhite had
somehow infiltrated its TelePrompTer software, delaying
newscasts and leaving news anchors nearly tongue-tied as they
wrestled with proper sentence structure.
There is concern among law enforcement officials that
Strunkenwhite is a harbinger of the increasingly sophisticated
methods hackers are using to exploit the vulnerability of
business's reliance on computers. "This is one of the most
complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever
encountered. We just can't imagine what kind of devious mind
would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on
communications," said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via
the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments
could leave him tied up for hours. Meanwhile, bookstores and
online booksellers reported a surge in orders for Strunk &
White's "The Elements of Style."
Christine: I wonder what bored English student wrote this?
Or perhaps a frustrated professor?
TROJAN HORSE WARNING
---
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
IF YOU RECEIVE A GIFT IN THE SHAPE OF A LARGE
WOODEN HORSE DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT!!!! It is
EXTREMELY DESTRUCTIVE and will overwrite your
ENTIRE CITY!!
The "gift" is disguised as a large wooden horse about two stories
tall. It tends to show up outside the city gates and appears to be
abandoned. DO NOT let it through the gates! It contains
hardware that is incompatible with Trojan programming,
including a crowd of heavily armed Greek warriors that will
destroy your army, sack your town, and kill your women and
children. If you have already received such a gift, DO NOT
OPEN IT! Take it back out of the city unopened and set fire to
it by the beach.
Christine: we should all be so lucky to live near a beach!
FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU
KNOW!
Heads up everybody. I appears that the Hitler virus is on the
loose.
The Hitler virus doesn't crash your system or wipe out your hard
drive. No, it takes over your computer and sets out to conquer
the world -- starting with you! Yes, the Hitler virus is designed to
bend you to its aims. It will use your PC as a power base to
enslave you and put you to work duplicating the Hitler virus on
your neighbor's PC. The Hitler virus will not harm you until you
are no longer necessary to it's goals. Your life will be a living hell
once your PC is infected. Your PC will first access the Hitler
virus web site and download a gigabyte of support files. You say
you don't have a gigabyte of free space? Hah! You'll be
marching down to the store to buy a new hard drive! Once the
gigabyte of support files are downloaded, your PC will be
playing a lot of milaristic music and it will be shouting orders at
you. And if you try to leave the house against orders, your PC
will phone the police and have you arrested. I bet you're thinking
that you will never become the stooge of your PC. Hah again!
The Hitler is unprincipled in the extreme. It will grab your bank
balance and your nest egg and every other asset it can lay its
electronic hands on. When your PC shows you what it's got and
what it can do to you, you'll march. Yeah, you'll march and you'll
follow and your PC will lead. You think the Michelangelo virus
was bad? What did the Michelangelo virus ever do to you? Sure
it downloaded all that pornography from the same sex
newsgroup. But the Hitler virus is "mean" and I do mean
"mean"_.
I hope your PC isn't infected. Because the only way to remove
the Hitler virus is to bomb your house into rubble...
Christine: if you think having this virus is bad, try having a
budgie with delusions of grandeur. It will scream at you when you're not fast
enough with the food, ignore you in worse ways than a cat, beg for attention,
and then every six weeks you truck it over to the vet to have its beak clipped.
