Louis Proyect wrote: > > At 05:00 PM 7/27/99 -0700, you wrote: > > When I recevied this two days ago, I went to McAfee.com, a premier > > virus protection software manufacturer, to check on it. At that > > time there was NO listing, advisory, or warning about this > > so-called virus. Before you clutter cyberspace with this, check > > for yourself. > > For fucking christ's sake, this is the fourth time today this hoax > has been exposed. Talk about clutter... Hey Louis, thanks for the warning, even though it was a hoax. I myself got a real early copy of the Explore.Worm virus (the one with "zipped_files.exe") and the morning I got it there was as yet no advisory whatsoever at either Symantec or McAfee. Explore.Worm walked right past my anti-virus program; I didn't get an updated definition file that could detect it until a day or two later. Explore.Worm is that bad-ass virus that recently ate the contents of at least a thousand networked PCs at MacDill Air Force Base right down the road. If it weren't for the fact that I automatically distrust any and all possibly virus-bearing files I get unsolicited off the Internet, it might have been a thousand and one. My company, a small civil engineering firm with about 50 PCs in the main office, sees a virus coming in through the eMail about every six weeks these days. (One came in last week, another damned Word macro thing, I forget the name. Say, you guys want a copy of Melissa? I got one of those too.) Better safe than sorry. If you all hear a virus rumor, post it anyway. If I read ten hoaxes and one true one and I pay attention to all eleven of them, then when I download the payload at home I save myself all the trouble of fixing my personal system; and if I download the payload into the office network, wow, I shudder to think of the office-wide hassles I'd get to avoid by keeping that "paranoid" attitude. Bandwidth is dirt cheap; reinstalling all your software is going to be pretty expensive, and restoring all your unique data files might turn out to be entirely impossible. Michael, how would you like to have had some joker's Visual Basic hack wipe your working copy of that book you're finishing up, hey? How's your backups, people; are you all faithfully backing up your boxes regularly? Yeah, sure you are! Yours WDK - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
