Halloween

Text of this virus hoax reads as follows:

A friend of mine recently received a file "Trickor1.exe". When he opened the file, a halloween cartoon greeting appeared and asked "trick or treat". He thought it was cute until he found out the trick was really on him! This is a very dangerous virus. His entire harddrive was wiped out and could not be re-formatted. Unfortunately he had access to a network and the entire network was also wiped out! The virus then attached a unknown remote server line to his company's network and phone lines. All of these lines were immediately clogged up as the unknown server used their phonelines to make out-of-country calls and call various pornlines. This could happen on a regular home modem, or a company server. The amount of charges that could be applied to your line depends on the number of lines and size of your company's server. This little email greeting could cost you or your company lots of money and time, so please be on the lookout!! I checked into and it has a few alternate names. It can be known as (could be in .exe or .zip format):

Trickor1.exe Trickortreat.exe Hallogreeting.exe happyhalloween.exe H20.exe TorT.exe

Please be on the lookout for any of these files attached to emails. There could be various subjects on the email title but an example is: Trick or Treat, you make the call. There usually isn't any content in the body of the email, but there could be.

Pass this along to everyone you know!!!

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.