I returned home from Bible Studies this evening to find my father sitting at my computer with a triumphant look on his face.
He turned to me and beamed, “I just deleted three viruses from your computer.”
I was surprised. I’m fairly fastidious about my antivirus scanning and usually scrutinise my firewall logs. He told me that he’d deleted some files on his own computer with ‘teddy bear’ icons, called JDBGMGR.EXE. He was about to do likewise on my computer as well as mum’s.
I told him it was a hoax at once. I looked at my screen and saw that the files were still in my Recycle Bin. Thank God I came home in the nick of time (we actually finished class punctually today). I restored the harmless Java files.
I had received an email from someone else just a month ago with the same bogus message. In fact I think I was still in university when I first received the hoax warning. So there’s been a resurgence of sorts!
So, just in case any of your friends send you the same email, take a look at what the leading antivirus and security companies have to say about this prank.
The Urban Legends website also has a page dedicated to this hoax, along with other fanciful tales of yore.
Fortunately, according to this article, your system won’t die on you should you have already cleared your Recycle Bin, as it is not an essential file:
For those hapless folks who’ve deleted the file, there is good news. Unless you are a Java developer, the file is not essential to normal operation and its absence should not create any adverse affects. If you do encounter problems with Java applications, you will need to either contact the vendor of the application for a new copy of Microsoft Virtual Machine or you can download Sun Java Virtual Machine instead.