In article RBM8j.102$Uq4.46@trnddc06, John Mazor wrote:

"John Mazor" wrote in message
news:jwM8j.9980$rZ3.4647@trnddc07...

"Morgans" wrote in message
...

"Stefan" wrote

Serious virus warnings are *never* distributed by e-mails like the
one you posted.
Actually, this e-mail itself can be considered a kind of virus,
because it fills
mailboxes, wastes people's time and probably causes some friendly
christmas mails to
be deleted unread.

Actually, I would not say never.

Where I work, there are a lot of computers networked together, and a
lot of people
bringing things (files and software) from home and sticking into
them, and that adds up
to a great chance of something undesirable getting into the system,
and spreading if a
warning is not passed.

That is how I got this warning, and admittedly, I did not spend as
much time checking
on it, as I would have done if I had been at home.

This may have been bogus but there is some valid history behind these
things. Back in
the DOS days any way that you could get the victim's PC to execute
just two lines of DOS
commands would have been fatal:

cd C:\
delete *.*

Now that I think about it, all it takes is

del c:\*.*

It's been a while since I had to know DOS commands.

Of course all that either of those command sequences did was delete
the _regular_ files in the top-level directory of the first hard-disk.

Since the top-level directory has a (small) fixed maximum size, people
who 'knew something' would not put _any_ regular files directly in
that directory, the only thing there would be other directories. plus
the 'hidden/system/read-only' system files. For these kinds of people,
a 'del c:\*.*' did absolutely _nothing_, even if you suppressed the 'do
you really want to do this?' prompt. _when_ the extra switches became
available, the _really_ dangerous command was "format c: /q /y"

I used to make a habit of renaming the "format' command to something else
just to ensure that 'something wicked' couldn't do that.