Is this worth doing?

[DaveH]

A friend sent me this,is it worth doing?
HOW TO PROTECT YOUR ADDRESS BOOK!


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 fact that 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 "AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA"



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 AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, 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 AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA 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.

[Sam]

Do yourself a favor and download AVG free edition. It scans incoming and outgoing mail messages and it's free.

Those spam worms and viruses are pretty slick and I doubt one invalid email address is going to fool them.

[Steve]

First of all, by the time you realize it has happened, it has already wormed your address book. Done deal, finished, you've been had...

Do yourself and everyone else a special favor, use a proven, legit virus scanner and keep it running in memory.

And second, don't fall victim to all the "scare" mails about viruses. Keep your stuff up to date and kick back.
Enjoy, crack open a good bottle and light a good cigar.....
Microsoft will heal all your wounds.

[DaveH]

Thanks for the free advice

[ffemtreed]

Its a Hoax will not work.

As for the message about you receiving a non delivery report if that address fails is completely false.

When a virus sends mail out as you they install their own SMTP server and send mail out that LOOKS like it came from you but the actual address is false and you won't be notified of any undeliverable messages. In other words they don't use your actual email to send the virus.

As for the virus stopping at the first email address, thats a hoax to. The Virus is going to enumerate any email address it finds and send itself out. Why would the virus care if it sends to false addresses, The virus's don't even check to see if its deliverable.

Assuming that the virus will start at the top of the address book is a mistake also. Just because alphabetically makes it nice to us humans, those 1 and 0's could care less. The address book is stored in a flat file(all addresses are compressed and saved in a single file) and those virus's will just start at the top of that file and not sort the entries, thus it will get the addresses in the order you entered them in the address book, not the alphabetical order. There might be some email programs that do sort the file, but I venture 90% of the address books are sorted by the program that uses the address book and the actual file itself is not sorted.

As Sam said get yourself a good anti virus scanner, run lavasoft adaware once a month on your computer or whenever you notice it slow down. Don't run as a local administrator on your PC (run as a standard user). Use Firefox or opera and make sure you have all Microsoft critical updates applied. Using those steps will make it hard for any virus to infect your system.

[lookinbeachie]

Hey Sam!
Is the AVG system any better than say Norton Anti Virus? Can they both be used together.. or better to just use one program?
Thanks for your help!
Di

[ffemtreed]

Never Ever use two anti virus scanners at the same time if they both feature on access scanning. Your system will slow down to a crawl and won't be any more secure.

Just pick one anti virus program and keep it updated. (set it to auto update daily)

If you don't want to spend money AVG is good.

if you want to spend some money Mcafee and Norton are very good. my personal choice is McAfee because it just seems less intrusive to your system and updates are easy. Norton is good if you just use the virus scanner and don't install all that other security crap that comes packaged with it.

[mdram]

i run avg at home, no problems with it. at the office i have CA etrust stuff installed, and love it. if your networked make sure you have a virus scanner that will lock the infected computer from any network access until you cure it

[Sam]

I use AVG over McAfee and Norton any day of the week. I have seen AVG find viruses that the other two couldn't and they are both resource hogs.

[Dave]

i just picked up a new notebook and it has avg installed on it, I have used norton and macafee and both eventually screwed my pc. i was using firefox as my main program no bugs just got to watch the sites i surfed, i hope sam is right about avg.

[ffemtreed]

You will be fine with AVG, just make sure you keep it updated!

[lookinbeachie]

Thanks for the info... I am using Norton and I really don't like it - seems like something is always going wrong with it??
Dianne

[Bohica]

Norton sucks.


AVG.

[Steve]

Originally Posted by Bohica

Norton sucks.

Can you provide details of your analysis of the product?

I find Norton a little too bulky and hoggish of resources.
They have incorporated far too many bells, whistles and general bling.

I like a product that does what it is supposed to do without trying to be a "Does All".

McAfee has the same general affliction, loaded with useless proggies that eat memory.

When my Norton and McAfee subscriptions run out I'll just use AVG.

[Bohica]

Yeah. Back when I was doing DT support, I had several clients that used Norton and several that used McAfee (This was in the pre AVG days).

My ratio of virus removal calls was like 5:1 (Norton:Mcafee).

I saw one virus eat Norton alive, and all data was lost.

That's why I think it sucks.