It’s a bad world out there in cyberspace

I recently got this advice sent to me by one of our neighbours on the estate:-

How to protect your e-mail address book A computer repairman says this is like having gold. This is a good thing. I learned a computer trick today that's really ingenious in its simplicity.As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus infecting all your friends and associates. This trick won't keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact that the worm has got into your system.

Here's what you do:

First, open your address book and click on 'new contact,' just as you would do if you were adding a new friend to your list of email addresses. In the window where you would type yourfriend's first name, type in 'A'. For the screen name or email address, type AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA

Now, here's what you've done and why it works:The 'name 'A' will be placed at the top of your address book as entry #1.This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your friends.When it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered.

If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phoney address), the worm goes no further and your friends will not be infected.

Here's the second great advantage of this method: If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system.

You can then take steps to get rid of it! Pretty slick huh?

Now, on the face of it, that might sound like a good idea but i thought I’d run it past my friend Pete who knows a lot more about computers than I will ever know and what he doesn’t know, his brother Dave does.

This is his reply Pete says:-

Nah, that's a non starter mate.
It sounds logical, but it makes some presumptions. It assumes that...
1. The worm sends rogue email using your email client
2. The worm collects its source addresses from your address book
In reality the worms get addresses from all kinds of different places. The also often carry their own SMTP delivery systems. There's no reason why the worm should identify itself as you being the sender, so even the 'undeliverable' report may not work.
As with 99% of such email propagated advice, I'd file it under 'well-intentioned nonsense'.

I reckon the only way to stop worms and other nasties from infecting your system is, as always, to install a good anti-virus program and keep it up-to-date. But beware, because Symantec say that up to 43 million people could have given their bank details to cyber criminals after being duped by fake anti-virus software online. Figures published by firm that produces Norton software, suggest 93 percent of the people scammed downloaded the rogue programs by choice after being tricked into believing it was legitimate. The company estimate that some cyber criminals are earning nearly $1.4 million a year from the ruse.

Web users fall prey to the scam when they click on links, pop-ups or flashing adverts warning them their computer is infected. The fake program then appears to run a virus check which tells the user their PC is infected and asks them to pay for it to be cleaned up.

But downloading the software can give criminals access to bank details and computer files. Symantec found 250 rogue programs were downloaded 43 million times in the 12 months to July 2009.

The best advice is to ignore those pop-up warnings and find a program for yourself from one of the leading companies like McAfee, Symantec etc. A lot of people I know use and trust AVG which produces a free version of their software.

You should also consider downloading and running anti-spyware as well. Again there are excellent examples of this software on the market which are free of charge. They give you a second line of defence which you need because the cyber criminals are getting good at making their software undetectable by popular anti virus programs.