Sophos

St. Patrick's Day

Type
Virus hoax
Description

Text of the hoax reads as follows:

St. Patrick's Day Irish Virus Alert

Top o' the mornin' to you. Bejesus! You have just received the "The St. Patrick's Virus". We don't have too much programming experience, so this virus works on the "honour" system. Please forward this email to everyone on your mailing list and then manually delete all the files on your hard drive. Thankin' you in anticipation for your co-operation. Paddy
Important

Many virus hoaxes:

  • falsely claim to describe an extremely dangerous virus
  • use pseudo-technical language to make impressive-sounding (but impossible) claims
  • falsely claim that the report was issued or confirmed by a well-known company
  • ask you to forward it to all your friends and colleagues

As usual, you are urged not to pass on warnings of this kind, as the continued re-forwarding of these hoaxes simply wastes time and email bandwidth.

It is possible that you may receive a hoax via email with a file attached. Obviously, such file attachments should be treated with caution as they may be virus infected. Sophos recommends deleting virus hoax emails, whether they contain file attachments or not.

Sophos suggests a policy to help prevent hoaxes from spreading in your company.