stoping worms and virus

[The_old_man]

One of my relitives sent me this hint for catching virus or worms that use the address book.

Enter a contact address of AAAAAAAA@AAAAAAAA.AAA as the first address in your book.

Any worm or virus that attempts to replicate will see this bogus addy. and will error out, stopping the replication and warning you.

 

[ReadyOne]

This is an old wife's tale that has no basis in fact.

It won't work.

The viruse doing the mass mailing from your address book doesn't care if any addrress, first last or middle, is bad. It slams them all.

 

[incognito989]

This is an old wife's tale that has no basis in fact.

It won't work.

Sort of. It *used* to work. Then the viruses started going a certain number down, and you had to have 20 or 30 bogus ones. And that worked for a while.

New worms take random ones, as well as email addresses in the internet browser cache. Also now they just make up addresses with domains that are in the address book now too.

I hate worms.

Best to run a FREE antivirus program from here (avg):
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php

 

[alricflaim]

A half decent way

To protect yourself from Viri and worms that use your address book is to:

1. Keep your address book in, yup, an address book. No addresses on your PC, then they can't send via your addresses. Sure you have the virus or worm, but it's going to have a hard time going anywhere.

2. Get rid of Outhouse....er outlook! Get a different email program, like Mozilla Thunderbird, or even just a web based mail, and to prevent spam, get your webmail from someone unusual. Hotmail is rife with spam, as is Yahoo. GMail will be just as bad, if not worse...however, my operamail account never gets any spam, because it's an unusual address.

 

[Bobmi357]

I'm going to chime in here agreeing with Alricflaim. Changing your email program to something which isn't considered standard would probably be your best and safest bet.

I use pegasus email, a free email program from pmail.com. Its address book is not in a format like outlook, it can not auto-run any attachment. You have to save it and run it manually, and quite frankly if you save and execute attachments you got via email from someone, you deserve the viruses you get. Pegasus cannot even display html well. Annoying, but it also means someone can't send you an html with an applet embedded in it.

You might also consider doing away with Internet Exploder...er Explorer, sure its the most popular browser, but only because microsnot is a monoply and our government is too wimpy to put an end to it.

The mozilla browser is excellent, so is the Netscape browser as well as Opera.

 

[sumaz]

Try "Norton Antivirus Pro 2004" or "McAfee Antivirus Pro 2004"

They are ones of the best.