Protect your Address Book

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I get emails from the public daily so I'm always on the lookout for ways to stop virus threats.
Today I learned a computer trick that's really ingenious in it's 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 AAAAAAA. In the window below where it prompts you to enter the new email address, type in Worm@alert.com . Then complete everything by clicking add,enter, OK, etc.

Now, here's what you've done and why it works: The "name" AAAAAAA 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. But when it tries to send itself to AAAAAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered (Worm@alert.com). 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 email almost immediately.

Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to Worm@alert.com 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!

In theory this should work with most worms. There are exceptions like Klex, which randomly selects contacts to send out, but this is so easy it's worth a try.

Pretty slick huh?

 

Good idea. I like it.

My phony email of choice: yoda@dagobah.com

[ August 23, 2002, 17:22: Message edited by: Big B ]

 

Inconvenient... but true.

 

Nice trick but I think I'll go with Tal on this one. I never kept or will keep anyone in my address book.

 

Well, if Tal didn't suggest that, then I was going to.

Unfortunately, once the people that program these worms find out about this, they'll come up with a way to counteract it, so not using the addressbook is the best solution.

 

Or just don't use Outlook, since all the worms use that program... there are other programs that work just as well.

 

Or just use Unix.

Which like, cures 99% of the 9000+ viruii and 4000+ trojans/worms that are detectable by Norton's and the Cleaner.

Open source rules.