That was exhausting!

I just spent somewhere in the vicinity of 20 minutes trying to help one of our users understand something. You see, while this particular individual is a relative genius when it comes to working in his field, he has very little knowledge of technology and the simplest PC tasks are often very difficult for him to grasp. (He’s sort of a savant, if you will) Well, one of our members passed along the now-famous jdbgmgr.exe hoax to him. Combine that with the various “bounced” emails he’s been getting as a result of someone having the SoBig virus, and he was a little panicked that somehow he had gotten a virus and was infecting all of these other people’s machines. I had to try and explain to him the way SoBig spoofs return addresses, detail how that works, and why he was getting the bounces, and then try and convince him that this latest “warning” was actually a hoax, and was not at all related to the bounced emails, it was just a coincidence of timing.

It was quite the mental challenge to explain all of this in terms a non-techie would understand, especially this early in the day! But, I think I managed to get through to him, at least until the next hoax email hits his inbox. 🙂

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