Virus in your address book

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Posted: Sat Jun 27, 2009 3:34 pm

A lot of you might already know this, but I didn't.

A computer repairman says this is like having gold.
This is a good thing. This computer trick is
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 [email protected]

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 [email protected], 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
none of your friends will 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 [email protected]
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.

Baiting Guru Joined: 08 Jul 2004 Posts: 11857 Location: UK

False, see Google Link! about it on Snopes and other sites.

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/quickfix.asp

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