Re: new virus warning

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Thu, 1 May 1997, Lee Hickling wrote:

> Incredible. I would have thought that the subscribers to the XyWrite mail
> list were too sophisticated to fall for this hoary hoax. I have saved the
> headers on the message that appeared this morning, and later on I'm going to
> try to reach a random sampling of them to ask where they got this from. I
> think there's a magazine piece in it for me.
>

Incredible as it may seem after all the hoaxes, this one is for real (as
several others have already reported).

With hoaxes so rampant, it's sometimes a good idea to check out a
reliable authority. The best one I know of is the CIAC (Computer
Incident Advisory Capability) of the US Department of Energy, at

	http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/

They have a page of certified hoaxes, and their biggest job is
squelching bogus messages purporting to come from the FCC or other
government agency.

They also carry alerts on known viruses. Among their "What's New" is
this bulletin:

  Alert- AOL4FREE.COM Trojan Horse Program Destroys Hard Drives (H-47a)
	Released (04/17/97)

You can get full information on this recent one, which others have
already described here.

CIAC is also a good source for information on macro viruses, which can
be carried by files of all the macro-capable Microsoft programs (Word,
Excel, Access, others?) and I assume executable macros from other
vendors.


What's changed from the days of Vaxmail is the ability to send these
executables as attachments. The caveat is obvious: don't execute
something you haven't scanned for viruses, and if your desktop email
program is configured to automatically execute attachments, turn that
feature off!

We may snicker at gullible AOL users who fall prey both to the hoaxes
and to real hazards like this, but after all they're vulnerable because
they're new to the computer world and to the wild internet west at the
same time. Being ridiculed doesn't help them move beyond that stage.
They need to develop the judgment some of us have had years to build.
All help to them--the faster newbies are absorbed into the civilized
online world, the safer it will be for all of us.

	Dorothy

---
Dorothy Day			
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
day@xxxxxxxx