Stephen Haffly wrote in a message to Sandro Gasparetto:
 SH> On (28 Mar 97) Sandro Gasparetto wrote to Kristopher
 SH> Young... 
 KY> If anyone receives mail entitled; "PENPAL GREETINGS!" please delete it
 KY> WITHOUT reading it!!!
 SG> You still beleive to the fairy tales, don't you ?
 SH> If this were an Internet newsgroup, then his warning would
 SH> be quite valid. 
No... it wouldn't be valid at all even there. Please check through the online 
sources for virus hoaxes and urban legends of the net for other equally 
official sounding warnings and alerts. 
 SH>  Concept, Wazoo, and their ilk have made
 SH> reading messages with attached word processing files quite
 SH> hazardous.  
Only for those of you silly enough to use a mail reader that doesn't ask for 
permission to launch a file and for those of you to still be using Microsoft 
Word 5 years after the first MS Word macro trojans hit the world. MS has 
fixes to stop Word et al from autostarting macros. Just go visit them and get 
them. 
 SH> I received a warning about mail from Microsoft mail (and 
 SH> possibly Microsoft Exchange) that could carry a nasty payload 
 SH> as well.  Since the channel through which that warning came was 
 SH> an official channel, I consider it to be a valid warning.
How official? I have had network administrators at major corporations go 
bonkers over this crap in the past. I actually interviewed at a place in the 
city that was going nust because they had just heard of the good times virus 
and were scrambling to add security to their internal mail system. They 
didn't even have external mail connections and didn't understand that the 
alert was a hoax in the first place. 
 SH> This is just another reason I like FIDO echomail better than
 SH> Internet newsgroups, and why I don't use anything Microsoft
 SH> if I can help it.  It seems that reality is catching up with
 SH> the urban legends :-( 
No... the urban legend is loosely based on reality, MS wrote a lot of macro 
stuff into Word and other things and unfortunatley never bothered to add 
security or limits, after all that might slow down their software and make 
real software look pretty damn good. 
Dave Calafrancesco, Team OS/2
dave@drakkar.mhv.net
... They got the library at Alexandria, they're not getting mine! 
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