I just got an Email from a cousin about a new virus, sent by an Email titled ‘It takes guts to say Jesus’. Has anyone else heard about this? Is it real? Apparently if you open it, it will reformat your hard drive.
The only way that a virus (or trojan horse) can be activated simply by opening an e-mail message is if it contains a “macro”, and you are opening the message with a program that automatically runs macros.
AFAIK, the only e-mail client that can run such macros when opening messages is MS Outlook, and as a default it does not automatically run them.
The “Guts to say ‘Jesus’” hoax is just a variant on the “Good Times” hoax, and has no validity whatsoever.
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Actually Undead Dude, there used to be a way that an email could do some nasty stuff to you if you opened them. Some older email programs didn’t handle the reply-to field quite correctly, and it was possible to overflow it and put a jumpto type command on the stack. This would, however, require that you A) Knew the email program being used, and B) Knew that particular email programs source code quite well.
These days, programmers don’t use statically defined field sizes, so overflow doesn’t occur. (Note, this is one way you used to be able to use finger and ping to gain access to a system as well.) 
But yes, Jesus’s Guts and GoodTimes are hoaxes, and would not work with todays email programs anyways.
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
—The dragon observes
Well, thanks for your replies and reassurances. I’m a little new to all this, and a bit naive, too, I guess. Now I gotta Email everybody I warned about this, and tell them what a goof I am, if they don’t already know.
I put out a weekly virus email to my clients and friends. I have never heard of that being a legitimate virus.
You should regularly check the three following site to see what viruses are out there:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/index.html http://www.mcafee.com/centers/antivirus/ http://www.datafellows.com/virus-info/virus-news/
Hope this helps you out.
opinion - a belief held often without positive knowledge or proof.
oppress - to burden harshly, unjustly, or tyrannically.
don’t oppress my ability to have an opinion
And thank you, TechChick68. I’d heard about viruses (viri?) but I never knew there were virus hoaxes too, and so many of them. I don’t understand where they would come from.
Iyamity writes:
Which is easier to write?
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
ACtually, you could argue that Good times and Jesus’s Guts are both successfull and working virus’s. What they have infected is the culture. They are viral meme’s rather than programs. But Akatsukami is right, it is much easier to write a virus hoax than a virus actual…safer too, since there are rewards for turning in virus writers, virus hoaxers just get spam.
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
—The dragon observes
I have always been royally annoyed by chain letters and virus warnings telling me to e-mail to everyone I know is just a chain letter to me. The next person to send me a virus warning will get from me a warning about the gullability virus. See http://ferrets.net/virus/gullibility.html
Hope I did the Hyper link correctly.