Warning: Thinking About Viruses Can Wipe Out Your Hard Drive

August 2, 2001

All week, I've been receiving e-mails containing viruses from various people across the Web. Apparently one of them used Outlook Express to send an e-mail to webmaster@bradydesign.com a while ago, and it got stored in his address book.

So this spam-virus starts e-mailing me copies of itself left and right. Then it infects some other people who also have Virus Express, and I start getting mail from all of them.

Until this happened, I'd never realized just how stupid people are. The computer industry has been telling them for years, "don't open suspicious-looking attachments." And these are what you'd consider suspicious -- if you have extensions turned off (so your Word document show up as "My Stuff" instead of "My Stuff.doc") you have an alleged JPEG file (or some other thing) that has the sprocket-in-window icon of a batch or command file. Don't people notice these things, do they just not care, or what?

So now we're blocking all their addresses. Hope they don't have anything constructive to send us.

August 1, 2001August 3, 2001