I received this email from a friend and wanted to talk about this:
VERY IMPORTANT , PLEASE READ THIS
Anyone-using Internet mail such as Yahoo, Hotmail,
AOL and so on.
[ad#ad2-right]This information arrived this morning,
Direct from both Microsoft and Norton
Please send it to everybody you know who has
access to the Internet.
You may receive an apparently harmless e-mail titled ‘Mail Server Report’
If you open either file, a message will appear on your screen saying:
‘It is too late now, your life is no longer beautiful.’
Subsequently you will LOSE EVERYTHING IN YOUR PC,
And the person who sent it to you will gain access to your
name, e-mail and password.
This is a new virus which started to circulate on Saturday afternoon.
AOLhas already confirmed the severity, and the anti virus software’s are not capable of destroying it.
The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself
‘life owner’.
PLEASE SEND A COPY OF THIS E-MAIL
TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, And ask them to
PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY!
THIS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED BY SNOPES.
http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/mailserver.asp
After doing my little research, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is nothing more than a warning that someone went over board on. I’ve check this on Snopes and it says that:
This latter version is difficult to classify as either “true” or “false”: The virus it references (i.e., the Mail Server Report worm) was a real one, but it’s neither new nor currently rampant (as claimed in the warning text), nor does it manifest itself in the fashion described (since the “symptoms” provided in the warning are merely a reworking of the text of an earlier virus hoax). All in all, that message doesn’t really merit the dire warning to “SEND A COPY OF THIS TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, And ask them to PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY!”
I decided to send a reply to my friend who email me this “Warning” and tell him this:
[ad#ad2-left]Although, This is a real worm. It however is over hyped and under no circumstances will it delete your files. I’ll quote from F-secure:
Warezov.W is a mass-mailing worm that sends itself as e-mail attachments to addresses found on the infected computer.
Typically, a mass-mailer arrives on a computer with an infected e-mail message. In some cases, the infected attachment can start automatically. In other cases, the system is infected when the user opens the attachment. When a typical mass-mailer is activated, it installs itself to the system and creates a startup key for itself in the Windows registry. It then stays active in the system’s memory. While active, the mass-mailer searches for specific files (HTML files for example) on all available hard disks for e-mail addresses. Finally, it connects to an available mail server and sends itself to all the addresses it has found.
Aside from this, Warezov.W also downloads another worm variant from a specified website on the Internet.
According to all my sources is if you are worried about this worm, then I highly recommend a good Anti-virus and Software firewall. This worm is easily detected by all the free anti-virus software out there. I like AVG because it scans all incoming emails before you even touch the email. Please don’t forward that to anyone else it seems to be an old email warning that isn’t really a warning anymore. It seems to be a scare email where there is no real chance of your data going bye bye. Just thought you’d like to know!!
So I tell you this, if you have any question of the likely hood of any emails you happen to come buy, you best best it to google it or ask your friend before you open the email up. It is best also to scan all email attachments before even considering opening them.
