Forward

Here is the text of the hoax:

Pass this on to anyone for whom you have an email address.... If you receive an email titled? "Forward", DO NOT OPEN IT. It will erase everything on your hard drive. This information was announced yesterday morning from IBM; AOL states that "forward" is a very dangerous virus, much worse than "Melissa" and that there is NO remedy for it at this time. Some very sick individual has succeeded in using the reformat function from Norton Utilites causing it to completely erase all documents on the hard drive. It has been designed to work with Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. It destroys Macintosh and IBM compatible computers. This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it...Pass this warning along to EVERYONE in your address book and please share it with all your online friends ASAP so that this threat might be stopped. forward this warning to everyone that might access it on the internet.

Many virus hoaxes:

• falsely claim to describe an extremely dangerous virus
• use pseudo-technical language to make impressive-sounding (but impossible) claims
• falsely claim that the report was issued or confirmed by a well-known company
• ask you to forward it to all your friends and colleagues

As usual, you are urged not to pass on warnings of this kind, as the continued re-forwarding of these hoaxes simply wastes time and email bandwidth.

It is possible that you may receive a hoax via email with a file attached. Obviously, such file attachments should be treated with caution as they may be virus infected. Sophos recommends deleting virus hoax emails, whether they contain file attachments or not.

Sophos suggests a policy to help prevent hoaxes from spreading in your company.