As many of you know, I seldom pass on the many "virus alerts" that fly
around the internet on a regular basis because they are hoaxes. But this
one comes from what I consider to be reliable sources including MSNBC,
ZiffDavis (PC Magazine) and Network Associates (makers of McAfee antivirus
software). It is not "Dangerous" in that it will do no damage to your
system, but the invasion of privacy and potential long range implications
it represents deserves some mention.
If you receive this file as an e-mail, do not execute it. Instead, delete
it from your system. In fact, NEVER execute attached files unless you know
and trust the source and know what it is that you are opening. There is
very little sent that is of real danger, but now and then there is a real one.
It seems obvious that this one is intended to give someone in China the
ability to use the on-line accounts of unsuspecting recipients of this
file. What they would do from there is anybody's guess. The very least is
that a lot of junk mail might start coming from your account and you would
be marked as a "spammer" requiring that you get a new e-mail account and
answer a lot of questions from your ISP.
"If you receive an attachment in e-mail called "picture.exe," don't
open
it. If you do, what happens next reads a bit like a spy novel -- this
Trojan horse drops two more programs called note.exe and manager.exe which
will search through your internet cache directory and, if you have one, the
directory that holds your America Online username and password. It then
encrypts that information, tries to establish an Internet connection, and
sends it all to an e-mail address in China.
Picture.exe first surfaced right before Christmas, when some Net users were
spammed with e-mail with the subject line "batty." Several postings to
Usenet virus groups followed; then Network Associates engineeers received
several e-mail alerts to what appeared to be technically not a virus but a
Trojan horse. (A Trojan horse does not replicate on its own, but a virus
does.) "
To read more about this go to :
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2183935,00.html
Orin R. Wells
Wells Family Research Association
P. O. Box 5427
Kent, Washington 98064-5427
<ORWells(a)bigfoot.com>
http://www.rootsweb.com/~wellsfam/wfrahome.html
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