MSUPA.COMP_NEWS posting # 174 From: George J Perkins Subject: Warnings of computer viruses and how to check their validity Date: 27-MAR-1997 08:00:00 Expires: 27-MAR-1999 08:00:00 I have recently received a number of messages passed on by people who received them from friends, relatives, and others, concerning an alleged "PENPAL GREETINGS" E-mail-borne computer virus. This is one of several known computer virus hoaxes making the rounds at the moment. This particular one has made its way through several large corpor- ations' Management Information Systems, lending it more credence since the MIS people who should have known better, or at least taken three minutes to check, didn't squelch the hoax and in some companies actively propagated it. By "taken three minutes to check", I really mean just that -- it would have taken about that amount of time to find out about the "PENPAL GREETINGS" warning's status as a hoax and not a real virus. For future reference, there are now several web sites available, provided mainly by companies which produce anti-virus software, which go into the issue of virus scares and hoaxes in great detail. If you receive a warning of a virus by E-mail, one way to see its status as hoax or real threat is to check one or more of these web pages: http://www.av.ibm.com/BreakingNews/HypeAlert/ http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html http://www.drsolomon.com/special/ http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html http://www.datafellows.com/news/hoax.htm This way, you will not be duped into further propagating false warnings in the case of hoaxes. All of these sites have information on other pages about real computer viruses and what to do to protect against them and/or purge your system of them (step 1 is usually "buy our product", but most of the sites contain further useful information independent of any particular anti-virus package). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- George J Perkins perkins@pa.msu.edu Office: (517) 432-3820 125 Physics-Astronomy Bldg, MSU FAX: (517) 353-4500 Home: (517) 332-2746 East Lansing, MI 48824-1116 --> Web URL:http://www.pa.msu.edu/~perkins/