You may have been fooled.

December 12, 2001

You may have been fooled. If someone sends you an email saying you have the SULFNBK.EXE virus, they are lying. According to McAfee.com, it is a hoax. Here is what the nice people at McAfee had to say.

McAfee AVERT Labs would like to inform you of a new email HOAX.

This email message is just a HOAX. Although, the SULFNBK.EXE file may become infected by a number of valid viruses (most commonly W32/Magistr@MM, the details of this HOAX message are not based on actual events.

We are advising users who receive the email to delete the message and DO NOT pass it on as this is how an email HOAX propagates.
SULFNBK.EXE is a Microsoft Windows utility that is used to restore long file names.

So yeah, don't worry about it if you get an email saying that you got passed this virus. I know I almost fell for it.

Really, this is quite an interesting virus. Most common viruses try to bring down big email systems by forcing your email client to send an email to everyone you know. When a big company gets this virus it ends up shutting down their whole system because of the flood of emails. This time, there is still a flood of emails but it is just propogated by the actually users. The definition of virus is expanding everyday. I know it's not the first time something like this has happened, but I haven't heard anyone actually consider these to be a virus themselves. I would like to hear some smart people talk about this.

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