Every year the festive mood of the Halloween catches on and everyone. People are busy having the trick or treat around the neighborhood. Halloween invitations are never easy to ignore especially when family and friends are the ones inviting. People join in the festivities by displaying pumpkins, jack o’ lanterns and many more in the windows or on your porch. Everyone’s in the party dressing up like a witch, a monster, a vampire, a ballet dancer, a Pokemon or a cowboy.

On the cyber world some naughty people would like to celebrate too. This is by creating halloween computer virus to annoy people just for the plain fun of it. Normally, the virus is sent through email as an executable file attachment. I don’t know if you ever have receive an email which contains a similar message:

A friend of mine recently received a file “Trickor1.exe”. When he opened the file, a Halloween cartoon greeting appeared and asked “trick or treat”. He thought it was cute until he found out the trick was really on him! This is a very dangerous virus. His entire hard drive was wiped out and could not be re-formatted. Unfortunately he had access to a network and the entire network was also wiped out! The virus then attached a unknown remote server line to his company’s network and phone lines. All of these lines were immediately clogged up as the unknown server used their phone lines to make out-of-country calls and call various phone lines. This could happen on a regular home modem, or a company server. The amount of charges that could be applied to your line depends on the number of lines and size of your company’s server. This little email greeting could cost you or your company lots of money and time, so please be on the lookout!! I checked into and it has a few alternate names. It can be known as (could be in
.exe or .zip format):

Trickor1.exe
Trickortreat.exe
Hallogreeting.exe
happyhalloween.exeH20.exe
TorT.exe

Please be on the lookout for any of these files attached to emails. There could be various subjects on the email title but an example is: Trick or Treat, you make the call. There usually isn’t any content in the body of the email, but there could be.Pass this along to everyone you know!!!Please ignore any messages regarding this hoax and do not pass on messages. Passing on messages about the hoax only serves to further propagate it.

source: www.symantec.com

Whether the message is just a hoax or it’s for real; I think being more vigilant in opening this kind of files would change things in the end. Keeping your virus scanner’s database of virus signatures by having the latest updates would be necessary. Also, scanning the files for any viruses prior to opening. If you don’t know from whom the email comes from just simply delete the email all together would be safer. Be prepared always as viruses, trojans, spyware and worm are getting crafty now a days.