Don't get hoaxed by a non-existent virus

My parents have been on the phone to me several times today as they received an e-mail from their nephew to say his system had been infected by a virus which had been sent on to everyone in his address book. The e-mail went on to give instructions for checking the system to see if the file conaining the virus was present (which it said was called jdbgmgr.exe) & for deleting it. It also said that my parents should pass on the message to everyone in their address book.

If anyone else gets that message, or a similar one, do not act on it - it is a hoax. My cousin was acting in good faith & simply passing on an e-mail a friend of his had received, who in turn had received it from a friend & so on back to who knows where. These hoax virus messages are almost as much nuisance as the real thing.

My parents had passed on the message to everyone in their address book before speaking to me & I've just spent ages telling all & sundry not to worry.

The file jdbgmgr.exe is a programme to do with debugging Java, I believe, and will exist on anyone's PC who is running Win 98 (and maybe other versions). So, anyone getting the e-mail saying that that file is a new virus undetected by Norton, McAfee, etc. will do a search, find the file & delete it! No harm will come by doing this & if the programme's ever needed users will be able to re-install it, but this type of thing causes unnecessary worry & work.

Why do these idiots start such hoaxes?

I thought I'd post this to advise you all of what's happened & maybe save a few other people a lot of pointless work.

 

Having posted to this BBS, I was just about to post to another one when I came across this:

Symantec re jdbgmgr hoax

which will be of interest to anyone who's fallen for this stupid hoax.

 

Thanks Martin. And you'd be amazed at how many fell for this particular gag. And how many of them had also bitten on a similar one a few years ago.

At least this one is pretty harmless since very few folks need to run jdbgmgr.exe to debug java code they've written.

 

Check For Hoaxes and Interesting Reading

Hey, all...maybe many of you know of this site, but we find it quite useful when receiving weird sounding emails, and just plain interesting. If you want to know if stories/pleas for $ to help a poor, dying young child/virus warnings, etc. are true, just go here:

http://www.snopes.com/

Enjoy!

Barb

 

Martainberry....

Amen to that

Regards,
FireDancer