For some reason, this was sent to me rather than vintage-race@autox.team.net.
Reply to author, not me.
mjb.
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From: "Edward E. Hanley III" <eeh3@sedona.net>
Subject: RE: vintage-race-digest V1 #739
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 21:00:26 -0700
Vintage Racing Group
Tuesday night I received an email from a Classic Porsche dealer in CA who
routinely sends me pix of cars in which he thinks I might be interested. The
subject was the cryptic and ungrammatical "Here you have, ;o)" and the
address in the "From:" heading was a real person (someone I knew). The
message contained the following text: "Hi: Check This!" Most importantly,
the message contained an attachment called AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs.
Unfortunately I double-clicked that attachment, because it came form someone
I knew. Many people can and will be fooled by this type of message. The
average Windows user never sees the final three letters in an attachment's
name, in this case, the telltale VBS that gives the attachment away.
Instead, the default Windows settings hide these file extensions, so you see
a file that appears to be called AnnaKournikova.jpg -- a JPEG picture of the
sexy tennis superstar Anna Kournikova.
Some were not able to open the attachment. If you couldn't, I'm glad. - it
was a virus!! This is the first experience I have had with viruses. And when
I received it I didn't even look at the file name, and wouldn't have known
the name of the person in the file anyway. I just thought it was an
interesting Classic Porsche to evaluate.
The lesson. Get yourself a good anti virus program. I use Norton Anti Virus
2001 (Symantec at http://www.symantec.com/). It costs $39.95 with a $10.00
rebate. You ask: 'Why didn't you know you had a virus?" Because, although I
had installed the new program last week, I hadn't updated it (via the
internet - FREE! - stupid) and the "Kournikova" virus was only one day old
yesterday when I passed it on to you folks! Amazing! What a bizarre world we
live in these days.
Do not open any message with the subject line: "Fwd: Here you have, ;o". It
was a virus sent to my computer, which in turn sent it automatically to all
email addresses I had listed in my address book. Delete it immediately!! If
you get one of these attachments, don't double-click on it! That's no
picture, it's a virus written in the VBScript language. According to Command
Central, makers of the highly regarded AVX antivirus program, this new
discovery is actually a worm, officially dubbed VBS.SST.A. Its payload
connects your computer to a server in the Netherlands if the date is January
26. It doesn't do any damage to your computer or data, but it does try to
send itself to everyone in your Outlook address book.
I am sorry if any of you got bit!! I hope your anti-virus is up to date. If
it isn't get it up to date. If your going to be online these days this type
of foolishness is going to become common place.
In this case I had the process stopped in about 5 seconds but it had all
ready sent 200-300 messages, all with the same virus.
People who start these things should spend a lot of time in jail thinking
about the damage they do to others.
Love to you all and, although I don't feel totally responsible, I am sorry
for any problems you may have encountered form my lack of attention.
Ed
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