An e-mail that claims that life won’t be beautiful if you unleash a virus hidden in a Power Point attachment is a hoax.
The hoax says the name of this nefarious hoax is “Life is Beautiful” and claims it will simultaneously cause you to lose everything on your computer and give the evil hacker “life owner” control of your e-mail and password.
Fortunately, everything about this e-mail is bogus.
Here’s the original hoax:
VERY IMPORTANT WARNING.
Please Be Extremely Careful Especially if using Internet mail such as Yahoo, Hotmail and so on. This information arrived this morning from Microsoft and Norton.
Please send it to everybody you know who accesses the Internet. You may
receive an apparently harmless email with a Power Point presentation “Life is beautiful.pps”. If you receive it DO NOT OPEN THE FILE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, and delete it immediately.
If you open this file, a message will appear on your screen saying: “It is too late now, your life is no longer beautiful”, subsequently you will LOSE EVERYTHING IN YOUR PC and the person who sent it to you will gain access to your name, e-mail and password.
This is a new virus which started to circulate on Saturday afternoon. WE NEED
TO DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO STOP THIS VIRUS. AOL has already confirmed the severity, and the antivirus softs are not capable of destroying it. The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself “life owner.”
PLEASE MAKE A COPY OF THIS EMAIL TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS. PASS IT ON
This e-mail hoax is actually a little closer to reality than many of its kin. There are viruses that arrive via e-mail and disguise themselves as all manner of files, including PowerPoint ones. In my experience though, most viruses and Trojans nowadays don’t actually declare that they’ve taken over your machine when they infect it. And we haven’t seen a virus yet that anti-virus software isn’t capable of stopping (though it may take the company’s a little while to get up to speed).
Here are the links to the anti-virus company debunkings:
- Symantec: Life is Beautiful Hoax: The site offers debunkings of the hoax in eight languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, and French
- McAfee: Life is Beautiful Hoax: A short debunking with versions of the hoax in several different languages.