Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Virus in Howard Mead's message on coho mailing list

[Melhpine (Melhpine]

In a message dated 9/1/99 1:02:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
eris [at] ncal.verio.com writes:

> > > Please be aware that the attachment Happy99.exe sent by Howard Mead with
>  > > the subject "re:tagline for cohousing community" contains a virus.
>  > > According to my husband, (one of the techies of this world), if you 
end 
> up
>  > > downloading this email to your hard drive, do NOT open this email; just
>  > > DELETE it.)
>  
>  I've had experience with this virus.  Just READING the email will not
>  activate the virus -- you have to run the executable program happy.exe by
>  clicking on it in order to get the virus.  You CANNOT GET A VIRUS JUST BY
>  READING EMAIL...you have to open an attached executable file.

Allow me to put my two cents in. I believe Eris is right, at least in 
general, that you can't get a virus by reading an email, but I don't believe 
you necessarily have to execute the program in order to get the virus. There 
are some programs that can execute themselves after they are downloaded onto 
your hard drive and spawn a virus. In the case of the Happy99 virus, it comes 
as an attachment to email, and you're not going to get the virus by reading 
the email. But I believe that it's possible for you to get the virus if you 
download the program. So the point is, whether you read the email or not, the 
main thing is not to download the program onto your hard drive. That would be 
like playing with fire.

What this particular virus is is a program that finds all of the email 
addresses of people and lists you send email to and it send them an email 
with the program attached. What the program does if you execute it is to 
explode all over your screen with Happy '99 messages. I guess it was started 
last New Year's. It does not do any more damage than that, so it is not 
particularly vicious, but it will keep replicating itself and sending itself 
out via email.

-- Mel Harkrader-Pine