I was shown this today. Apparently it’s circulating in an email:
if meltdown@hotmail.com adds you to your MSN Contacts, DO NOT add it because it’s a virus. Tell everyone on your contacts because if somebody on your list accepts it then you get the virus too(copy and paste this into a new message because some people do not read forwards!)Don’t just forward it
I’ve found reference to it via Google here, but otherwise nothing special so far. It looks 99% likely to be a hoax though.
It amazes me how people see these things, and blindly send them on. I see quite a few things like this, and Sophos publish the latest hoaxes on their site here. I think by far the most worrying thing about it, is that when I tell people it’s a hoax, it’s either ignored, or treated with the same level of contempt as if I had just insulted their entire family.
People’s attitudes to such things are slowly changing. Some people don’t forward anything like this. I don’t tend to forward any sort of chain mail or other rubbish, unless I’m certain its of some worth, or the recipient will get something out of it. Otherwise I’m just wasting my time, their time, and the bandwidth inbetween.
Of course, the last thing I want to see is the entire internet community reaching for their tinfoil hats every time they read their mail, but by the same token I think people could try using some reasoning with these things. What a lot of people don’t realise is that these sort of ‘social engineering’ viruses are spreading because people are genuinely scared of what a virus can do. It’s good to be worried, but still apply some common sense to it.
Lets look at the message again. The message asks you not to add a certain user. Fair enough. It then says to send it to ‘everyone on your contacts list’. So this message gets sent to ten friends, which gets sent to ten friends (10×10) which gets sent to ten friends (10x10x10). Before long, it’s turned into a few billion emails, its wasting bandwidth and people’s time, and its having exactly the same affect as a virus that crashes a PC or steals information. And all with just two badly written sentences.
No flashy code or Windows vulnerability required. Just one paranoid user.