On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 08:09:10PM -0400, Rusty wrote:
<snip>
> READ IMMEDIATELY AND PASS
> ON TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW
>
> Someone is sending out a very
> cute screensaver of the Budweiser
> Frogs.
>
> If you download it, you will lose
> everything! Your hard drive will
> crash and
> someone from the Internet will get
> your screen name and password!
> DO NOT
> DOWNLOAD IT UNDER ANY
> CIRCUMSTANCES!
<snip>
I don't know if this is real or not, but I suspect not. It follows the
pattern of a multitude of bogus warnings that get issued all the time.
Consider: if you simply _download_ the thing, your screen name (hunh?)
and password will go to _somebody_. Ordinarily, someone would have to be
_listening_ as you download to capture something like that. Who's going
to sit around and do that? To you, particularly? And then your whole
hard drive will get wiped? What are the chances of a virus payload doing
that? Not very common these days. And all this is just if you _download_
it, not to mention _running_ it. I suppose you could do _something_ to
someone's machine if they downloaded something, but you'd have to be
awfully expert at cracking to do it. And if you were that good, why
crash their machine? A bigger challenge would be to have the user
completely unaware that his machine had been compromised, and have it
thereby infect other machines.
On top of all that, this could pretty much _only_ happen if they run
Windows.
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:11:17 EDT