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Tuesday, February 23, 1999
E-mail scare: It's not a warning, it's a hoax
By David Allen
Stripes Okinawa Bureau Chief
CAMP FOSTER - "VIRUS WARNING!"
The message is guaranteed to make new computer-users cringe when opening e-mail. Everybody's heard about computer viruses destroying important documents, eating up hard drives and short-circuiting whole systems.
And so it was last week when a warning was sent to hundreds of people connected with the U.S. military throughout the Pacific that a virus called "Guts to Say Jesus" had been unleashed on an unwary public.
"I received this over the weekend, please read and heed the warnings," the e-mail message pleaded. "If you receive e-mail titled, 'It takes Guts to Say Jesus,' DO NOT open it. It will erase everything in your hard drive."
A GS-13 employee of the Defense Commissary Agency in Washington, D.C., allegedly sent it, but no one answered the phone number that accompanied the warning.
The message has already made the rounds on Okinawa, inlcuding on Kadena Air Base and at several Marine camps.
A quick check of organizations that monitor virus hoaxes had already declared the "Guts" warning to be a hoax.
"It is a sham, meant only to panic new or inexperienced computer users," reported the AntiVirus Research Center, a division of Symantec, which sells Norton AntiVirus, a popular virus detection program.
"Please ignore any messages regarding this supposed virus and do not pass on any messages regarding it," the center advised. "Passing on messages about this hoax serves only to further propagate it."
Part of the hoax warning urges recipients to resist the urge to investigate: "Do not open or even look at any mail that says RETURNED OR UNABLE TO DELIVER. This virus will attach itself to your computer components and render them useless."
"These may be considered just practical jokes by some people, but they can be malicious," said Douglas MacDougall of Okinawa-based Gino-Watts Inc., a computer services company.
"Sure, some like this are meant just to scare people, but others can hurt people. For instance, a competitor can kill your Web-based marketing plan by putting out a warning that any mail which contains the name of the marketer contains a virus."
"The important thing to remember is an e-mail message by itself cannot infect your computer," MacDougall said.
"Your e-mail doesn't process anything, so there's no way for a computer virus to get in," he said. "The only way to receive a virus is by downloading it."
Viruses usually piggyback their way into computers on the backs of legitimate programs, MacDougall said. Viruses can also come in the form of malevolent macros embedded in word-processing files. "So, the only way to get one through e-mail is if someone sent you a program in the form as an attachment to the e-mail message," he said.
"The rule of thumb on attachments is never open one unless it's from somebody you know and completely trust."
He said most e-m ail programs warn users about the dangers of opening up attachments.
"Viruses can be embedded in anything, from those funny little animations sent as jokes to photos," MacDougall said. "Even if you trust the person who sent it to you, check to see how many people are on the list of recipients in the forwarded part of the message. If it looks like a chain letter, don't open the attachments. Some of these viruses won't kick in for a month or so, so even calling your friend about it might not suffice as a warning.
"Having that cute animation of a Christmas tree isn't worth wiping out your hard drive," he said.
He said the worst virus hoax he's seen was one that appeared two years ago. The e-mail message told recipients that if they received the warning, their computer had already been infected.
"It said they would lose all their files by a certain date," he said.
"Some businesses lost thousands, maybe millions of dollars by shutting their systems down for two days just to back up their files."
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。