Are You An Electronic Typhoid Mary?

Some new viruses point fingers the wrong way. – Ed

“Typhoid Mary” was a cook in the NYC area in the early twentieth century. She was a typhoid fever carrier. This means that she didn’t get sick from it, just the people who ate her food.

The health authorities kept finding her the cause of some typhoid outbreak; they kept telling her not to cook anymore; she kept ignoring them, and the people eating her cooking kept getting sick and dying. Eventually, she was effectively given a life sentence of quarantine.

What does any of this have to do with overclocking or even computers? There’s some Typhoid Mary viruses out there, and you may be carrying it without knowing.

Right now, about 20% of the emails I’m getting are carrying them. They are the W32.Klez.E@mm virus
and the W32.Klez.H@mm virus.

What is especially aggravating about these viruses is that they finger the wrong people.

For instance, Joe Blow has Joe Citarella’s email address and mine. This virus can take Joe’s email address from an infected computer, put it in The “From” part of an email, and send it to me, with the virus, of course. No clue in the email as to who actually has the virus.

So you can be sending viruses out left and right infecting people, and you’ll never know it.

This isn’t theoretical. This has actually happened about five times already. Joe’s gotten infected email from “me” a couple times, too. Just got one from “Skip” this morning.

This is getting old fast.

So please, if you visit this site and have sent us emails in the past, please click on the links above and see whether or not you have the virus.

Don’t be a twenty-first century Typhoid Mary.

Ed

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply