Wobbler (California) Virus Hoax
There are hundreds of hoaxes like the Wobbler Virus hoax. This like the others warns you about an email with a particular title.
(If you get such a warning, especially if it includes the request to pass, forward, or share the message, you can
assume it's a hoax.)
These hoaxes typically warn you about some email message with a particular subject or title or file name being infected with a
virus. This type of warning is almost completely useless. (Remember, potentially any file could be infected with a virus so
NEVER open any file that you did not request...even if it comes from someone you know.)
The most common form of this hoax reads:
We just received this information from a pretty reliable
source and want to pass it on:
If you receive an email with a file called "California" DO
NOT OPEN IT!!. The email contains the "WOBBLER" virus. This
information was announced yesterday morning by IBM. The
report says that....."this is a very dangerous virus, much
worse than "Melissa" and there is NO remedy for it at this
time. some very sick individual has succeeded in using the
reformat function from Norton Utilities 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 at this time. Please pass this warning
to everyone in your address book and share it with all your
online friends ASAP so that the destruction it can cause
may be minimized."
This hoax makes a reference to the the Melissa email virus (this is a real virus) to give it some credibility. The hoax also refers to
a "reliable source" (unspecified) and IBM (but does not give a specific reference that you can confirm) to add credibility. It
contains the text to "pass this warning to everyone", which should be clear sign that this is a hoax. If you see such a request
in an email, you can immediately regard the message as hoax.
It's unfortunate that some credibility may be given to this hoax by the creators of some very widely used virus scanners. There is
a harmless joke program detected by the scanner as 'Joke.Win.Aloap' and by the name 'Wobbling Trojan'. The fact that this
file is flagged by an anti-virus program leads many people (I can't blame them!) to consider the file as dangerous.
Gruß Dampf
