Re: Warning e-mail viruses (Fwd)

[tdc@ehssun.lbl.gov (Ted M. de Castro)]

>> A virus is circulating on the Internet.  If you receive a message with 
>> the header "xxx-1" DO NOT READ IT.  Delete immediately or your disk will 
>> require treatment by a virus-scanner.  I have had two copies of this 

I've seen this hysteria too.  What is not stated is the platform this 
"virus" is supposed to infect.  A cross platform virus - although 
theoretically possible - is extremely improbable and would be very difficult 
to write.

Also - in DOS it would be completely IMPOSSIBLE for a virus to infect your 
system merely by reading a message.  Either A: - you would have to download 
and decode and execute some code - OR the message would have some sort of 
escape sequences that would redefine some key to cause the command to format 
your harddrive to be entered instead of the intended character.  This too is 
EASY to generically protect against!