Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in Your Email!
Sun 1 Jul 2007 12:03 PM

Can you believe it? Somebody's gotten their hands on the text of the not-yet-released final Harry Potter book, scanned it, and is sending it out to everybody! Why, it's too good to be true!

Wait... what?

Too good to be true? Hmmm...

That's right. If you take even a tenth of a second to think about this one, you'll realize it just has to be a scam. I mean, c'mon - if this were true, wouldn't there be news stories about the manhunt for the person who stole it? Wouldn't you have heard something about it? Now that Paris Hilton is out of jail, CNN has to report on something, after all!

Even if you ignore all of that, the size of the file you're asked to open should make you suspicious. It's a tad small to be the text of an entire novel. In fact, if you did open it, the only sentence you'd see is "Harry Potter is dead."

Of course, if you did open it, you'd immediately get infected by a pretty nasty worm (well, if you're on Windows). This thing infects your machine, and any USB device plugged into it. Then it hops from that USB device to any other computer you plug that device into.

The worm creates new users on your system (yes, those users are Harry, Ron, and Hermione), and change your start page in Internet Explorer to an Amazon.com page selling a spoof book entitled Harry Putter and the Chamber of Cheesecakes.

Sounds pretty harmless, huh? But think about it - lots of malicious folk will be hitting systems across the Internet trying to log on as Harry or Hermione or Ron. Any time they hit an infected system - they're in. And now, they can do whatever they want.

Protect yourself. Besides learning spells, update your antivirus, and follow the same old advice I keep giving you: stop and think. If it seems too good to be true... you know the rest.