At 03:40 PM 4/15/96 +0800, Ramli Bin Jaafar wrote:

According to several reliable sources there is a deadly virus on the Internet. This is NOT a hoax! CAN ANYBODY CHECK THIS OUT, PLEASE..

Note: The reliability of all information below is UNKNOWN.

WHAT: Virus Alert: PKZIP 3.0 Trojan Loose on the Internet

Not again! There is a trojan that claims to be a new version of PKZip. (Actually there is a long list of them.) The program you are refering to here is about three years old or more! Some of them destroy hard drives, some of them do not. (One I have seen is pretty buggy.) The reasons these warnings have started to crop up again is that the program was sighted by someone who did not remember the last go around with these trojans and wrote a panic type broadsheet. The posting is now curculating on every newsgroup and mailing list on the planet. (At least once.) I expect that it has attained "The Shergold Effect" and taken on a life of its own. As for the data on the released versions of PKZip, there is a Windows version (2.01 I think) that you do not have listed and is available from the PKWare site. There are also non-pkware unzippers that are not trojans. (Translated over from the Unix world. They are useful for handling long file names. (Something the PKWare version does not always do gracefully.)) Facts are useful, but the panic style of the warnings on this problem make things worse, not better. --- Alan Olsen -- alano@teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon