How To Stop Worms From Spreading

Lister

As you all probibly know, a worm when activated spreads itself by e-mailing to every address in your address book. There is a way of preventing this. Some of you probibly already heard this on 2FM the other day.
I use Outlook Exspress, so I'll use that as an example.

In Outlook Exspress,

(1)Add a new contact to your address book.

(2)Set the contacts first name as !000.

(3)In the e-mail address box put, WormAlert.

(4)Then just save and exit as usual.

The way it works is that !000 becomes the first name on your address list, so it is the first address that the worm will try to e-mail itself to, but when an e-mail is sent to this contact an error will occour, because WormAlert is not a valid e-mail address. So you will get an error saying WormAlert, informing you that a worm is on your system. Once the error is detected no more e-mails will can be sent.

This is prevention, not a cure, so once the worm is discovered you will have to get rid of it yourself.

Meh

Wrong

Lister

Originally posted by Meh
Wrong

How can it be wrong when your link takes you to a site that says the exact same thing, except the word Worm is replaced with word Virus, big deal. The reason that I said to put WormAlert as the e-mail address is that when the e-mail cannot be sent the words "WormAlert" will appear, alearting the user. So don't be so arrogant as to call me wrong.

Frank Grimes

From the above link:

Although the recommended action will help derail the spread of viruses designed to do a "send all," it will not counter the many that randomly select individual addresses from a user's address book or supplement addresses harvested from that location with those found cached elsewhere on the system

Meh

Originally posted by Lister
How can it be wrong when your link takes you to a site that says the exact same thing, except the word Worm is replaced with word Virus, big deal.

Read the entire linked article, instead of just the first page. The reason this is not a good idea is because:

1. It gives a false sense of security
2. It won't protect you from the destructive effects of the worm
3. It won't necessarily stop the worm from spreading. In fact, many of the newer email worms use their own SMTP engines and bypass Outlook's one. This means that there won't be a dialog box on error.

This is no substitute for regularly updating your antivirus definitions and email client. There are enough myths out there about computer security without you adding to them.