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Thursday, June 07, 2001

By David Radin

Virus creators often use simple words to trick their victims into infecting their systems with viruses by opening attachments to e-mail messages. But many people are getting smart to these "social engineering" tricks. Now, a new hoax claims victims by posing as a virus warning without an attachment -- getting victims to do their own dirty work by removing a system file (SULFNBK.EXE) from their Windows 95/98/Me systems.

Originally written in Portuguese and translated into English, this hoax asks you, the user, to delete the file (which controls long file names) instead of doing the dirty work itself. The body of the message says that the sender found the SULFNBK.EXE file on his own system and suspects that the recipient may find it too. It even tells him the name of the folder in which he found it. It then says the file contains a virus that was not detected by his anti-virus software, and gives instructions on how to find and uninstall the file. Of course, the user will find the file because it is not really a virus file, but part of the operating system. When he deletes the file he is actually disabling part of his own system. This is social engineering at its finest -- persuading unsuspecting victims to harm themselves technologically by removing a file that they really should have.

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Apparently the perpetrator has been successful because I have received a number of e-mail asking how to restore the file once they have deleted it.

If you receive the hoax with no attachment and find the file on your system (typically in the C:\indows\ommand folder), do not delete the file from your system. It should be there. However, a different virus is taking advantage of the SULFNBK.EXE hoax by e-mailing you a supposed new SULFNBK.EXE file. If you receive a file with that same name via e-mail, do not double-click on it or save it in any way. This attached file might actually contain a virus. If you open it or place it on your system you might actually be falling prey to somebody taking advantage of the hoax.

If you have already deleted the file, you can follow the instructions at www.Insider Radio.com to restore the file to your system.

Q: I really like to use the toolbars in my applications, but sometimes they take up too much space on my screen, so there is less room for my work. How can I make them smaller?

A: In many applications, you can change the amount of "screen real estate" taken by toolbars by (1) removing them from your screen, (2) putting multiple toolbars on a single row, or (3) customizing each toolbar to remove the buttons you don't use.

The methods are similar in most applications, but differ slightly. Here are the instructions that work for MS-Windows, MS-Office and other applications. If they don't work for the application you use, look in that application's user guide to see whether the toolbars can be changed. To remove a toolbar, right-click on the toolbars area, then uncheck the toolbar that you want to remove. To compact several onto one line, grab the handle (the 3D line) at the far left of the bottom-most toolbar, and drag it to the line you want it to share. To customize a specific toolbar, right-click the toolbar area, select [Customize...] and drag the buttons from the toolbars to delete them one at a time.