How to protect your computer from worm virus

[swiminsoda]

A computer repairman passed on this computer trick today that's really ingenious in its simplicity so I thought of sharing here. 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 and spreading further, and it will alert you to the fact that the worm has gotten into your system.

Here's what you do:
Firstly, 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 AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA

Now, here's what you've done and why it works:
The 'name 'A' will be placed at the top of your address book

Point #1.
This will be where the worm starts in an effort to send itself to all your friends. When it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because it is an invalid email address. 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.

Point #2.
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 AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. Then you can then take steps to get rid of it and protect your computer! Pretty slick huh? Less worry about opening mail from friends.

[dave147]

excellent tip and easy to implement - thank you

[Kishor Karsan]

Hi all

This is not true

check the link below

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/virus-control-hoax.html

http://antivirus.about.com/cs/hoaxes/p/aaaa.htm

It's a hoax, if you think about it, how long with the virus wait before undeliverable message, it won't, it will just send emails to all contacts in your address book

Regards

Kish

[rosetrees]

I haven't read Kishor's links yet (I will) - but it doesn't sound to me as if your computer repairman knows much about how computers actually work.

a) I can't imagine that worms send one email and then wait for a response. If your email program is set to check automatically, say every 15 minutes that means the worm would wait for a response to the first email and, if it happened to be an inactive address, give up and not send any more.

b) An undeliverable reply doesn't even tell you that you have a worm - as most worms substitute the "real" from address for one in the address list on the affected computer, so all the undeliverable reply tells you is that somewhere out there is an infected computer that contains both your email address and the address to which the email was sent.

I'm guessing this is the usual scare story that generally gets circulated by email.

[Dan Grossman]

Worms don't poll a mail server waiting for bounces. That'd be inane. It costs nothing to send 10,000 mails; why would it stop even if it could instantly know one of the mails was fake? This is BS.

[Sonam22]

I do'nt have much information about this.But I can give you an advice that you need to protect your computer against such computer worms and for that you should download and install the patches that are provided by operations systems and various software providers. You should also be careful in not opening the email attachments that are suspicious. These attachments can be in the form of exe files as well as Microsoft word or excels sheets.

[dealxrated]

Ya I would have to agree and say that this is not true, of course no offense to the op. Depending on the trojan it might actually go after all your saved passwords on your computer. Alot of rapidshare downloads and torrents are notorious for have 15/40 positives for some sort of virus. I would suggest simply running everything through virustotal dot com as well as if its showing up with a few that your not sure are false positives or not run it in a sandboxed environment and see how it acts. You can download sandboxie from sandboxie dot com. Hope that helps

[rapzet]

oooops, anyway, learnt a new lesson today

[webwyn]

This has long been debunked as a hoax, and really it only takes a little bit of tech knowledge to see through it. Worse is I have seen variants of this hoax telling people they don't need to worry about malware ever again. Really bad advice even if the trick worked.

In terms of marketing however, it's interesting how people believe the premise. I think people believe it because the 1st point contains a little bit of basic knowledge that people can relate to.

Then they are distracted by the idea in the 2nd point (viz: being notified of a delivery failure as alerting them to the worm), which sounds quite nifty. I think people then have a kinda 'eureka' moment and this is when most people are convinced by the premise overall, and subsequently pass on the bad advice to others.