How to keep a worm out of your address book!!!

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 !000 (that's an exclamation mark followed by 3 zeros). In the window below where it prompts you to enter the new email address, type in WormAlert. Then complete everything by clicking add, enter, ok, etc.

Now, here's what you've done and why it works: the "name" !000 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. But when it tries to send itself to !000, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered (WormAlert). 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.

Here's the second great advantage of this method: if an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your InBox almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to WormAlert 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!

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The following message (and several variants of it) has been spread through email. The original author is unknown.

Who among us doesn't know someone who has experienced the embarrassment of unknowingly spreading a computer virus via their email address book? It's time to STOP this from happening by TAKING CONTROL of your email program!

For those who are unaware, many computer viruses spread themselves by sending themselves to everyone in your address book. Imagine how you would feel if you were unknowingly infected with a computer virus, and worse yet, your friends, family, and business contacts were being targeted by your computer! Well, if you want to avoid this sort of thing, here's a great tip:

This tip won't prevent YOU from getting any viruses (you have to scan those attachments yourself before opening them to do that), but it will stop those viruses from latching onto your address book and sending itself out to others.

To avoid spreading computer viruses, create a contact in your email address book with the name :
!0000 with no email address in the details.

This contact will then show up as your first contact. If a virus attempts to do a "send all" on your contact list, your pc will put up an error message saying that: "The Message could not be sent. One or more recipients do not have an e-mail address. Please check your Address Book and make sure
all the recipients have a valid e-mail address."

You click on OK and the offending (virus) message would not have been sent to anyone. Of course no changes have been made to your original contacts list. The offending (virus) message may then be automatically stored in your "Drafts" or "Outbox" folder. Go in there and delete the offending message. Problem is solved and virus is not spread.

Symantec Security Response recommendations
Although this is technically not a hoax--in theory, it could work with a few older worms and viruses--Symantec Security Response strongly recommends that you ignore it. You should not rely on such "fixes" to prevent the spread of viruses, worms, and Trojans. Also, a hacker could exploit some variants of this message to make you more susceptible to loss of confidential information. The best defense against such threats is to have a current version of Norton AntiVirus installed, make sure that Auto-Protect is enabled, and update your virus definitions frequently. In addition, if you are on a network, or you have a full-time connection to the Internet (such as cable or DSL), you should be running firewall software.

Information on Symantec products may be viewed at:

http://www.symantec.com/product/

...your pc will put up an error message saying that: "The Message could not be sent. One or more recipients do not have an e-mail address. Please check your Address Book and make sure all the recipients have a valid e-mail address."

Ah-ha. This makes some sense. So, the idea is to have no E-mail address at all. Otherwise, the virus would happily send to a bad address, and subsequent addresses, and there would be no error message.

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