19 mei 2004

Victims of a Belgium virus

The past couple of days some people I know (names shall not be mentioned to protect the innocent) have become victim of a Belgium virus. I know some bloggers from Belgium may be reading this, and I hope I do not insult them. It's just that the “average” Dutch person thinks that Belgium people are not so bright. As it turns out, this is only true for these Dutch people.

So here's the virus. You receive an email from someone you know with the following text:

Hi, I had a virus on my computer. Because you were in my email list your computer might have become infected as well. Please check if the virus is on your computer and delete it if present. The file is called whatever.exe and will not be recognized by McAfee and Norton Anti-virus as a virus. So, after removing it, send this email to all persons in your address book.

Aah, a human version of a virus. I can't believe people buy this kind of stuff. They will remove the file (luckily for them it was innocent and nothing really vital) and send the email onward. They have been taught that they should not trust files sent to them from known people. But they will trust weird instructions. Does that make sense?

Comments

# Dennis v/d Stelt said:

I have two nephews who send mail like this, to me all the time.The bigger problem is, I'm in this list with dozens of other people. Everytime there's a virus like this, some kid receives $0.01 for every mail I forward, etc, etc, all these people in this big e-mail list, start forward me these stupid mails!!!I warned them like 2 or 3 times. Then I warned them again, that if they ever included me again, I'd build a program that uses my ISP's SMTP server and mail them all a stupid email back, every 10 seconds...Never got an email again! ;)

woensdag 19 mei 2004 19:43
# Alex Thissen said:

Oh, yes. I have to remember that one. And what probably made it really frightning to them, is that they knew you could do that for real, Dennis.

woensdag 19 mei 2004 22:07