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Taliban email virus (hoax)
The Taliban email virus is a humorous hoax that began circulating in November 2010. The hoax arrives as a spam email containing a message such as the following with the subject "Internet User" and a from address of a female name preceded by the title "Miss":
From: Miss XXXXX Sent: Friday, November 12, 2010 1:10 PM To: XXXXX Subject: Internet User Hi, You have just received a Taliban virus. Since we are not so technologically advanced in Afghanistan, this is a MANUAL virus. Please delete all the files on your hard disk yourself and send this mail to everyone you know. Thank you very much for helping us. Thanks & Regards Miss XXXXX
The email does no harm, contains no links to malicious content, and does not self-propagate. It could be argued to be a social engineering virus that propagates by tricking recipients into forwarding it, but it is probably more accurately classified as a humorous email due its patently ridiculous content. The fact that it circulates via spam networks is interesting since it has no possibility of accruing benefits to the originator either through monetary reward or code execution. If it does end up to be an effective occurrence of social engineering, it will be because it is so funny that people forward it to acquaintances.
The hoax has been observed and documented on several Internet security websites.[1][2]