McAfee > Theat Center > Virus Detail Page

Overview

Aliases

• Californi.exe

• Wobbling

Characteristics

This is both a hoax and a joke program. There have been email messages passed around which indicate that an attachment named "Wobbler" or "Californi" will destroy your computer however based on the analysis of the executable popularly traded around the Internet named "californi.exe", this is not true.

It is true that at one time, the executable was detected as a trojan named "Wobbler" by an early virus definition file for Dr. Solomon's Toolkit. The detection has since been suppressed as this file is clearly not a trojan but is a joke program.

This email message is just a HOAX, currently we know of no other message that the user will receive about the HOAX as the initial email states.

Below is the actual text from the message that may be received via email:

---------beginning of email copy-------
Thought you might be interested in this message. If you receive an email with a file called "California" do not open the file. The file contains the "WOBBLER" virus.

This information was announced yesterday morning by IBM. The statement says that ... "This is a very dangerous virus, much worse than 'Melissa' and there is NO remedy for it at this time. Some very sick individual has succeeded in using the reformat function from Norton Utilities causing it to completely erase all documents on the hard drive. It has been designed to work with Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. It destroys Macintosh and IBM compatible computers. This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it at this time."

"Please pass this warning to everyone in your address book and share it with all your online friends ASAP so that the destruction it can cause may be minimized."
---------end of email copy-------

Symptoms

Not applicable.

Method of Infection

Not applicable.

Removal

Users should either ignore or delete messages received matching this description.

Variants

Variants

N/A

All Information

Overview -

Aliases

• Californi.exe

• Wobbling

Characteristics

Characteristics -

This is both a hoax and a joke program. There have been email messages passed around which indicate that an attachment named "Wobbler" or "Californi" will destroy your computer however based on the analysis of the executable popularly traded around the Internet named "californi.exe", this is not true.

It is true that at one time, the executable was detected as a trojan named "Wobbler" by an early virus definition file for Dr. Solomon's Toolkit. The detection has since been suppressed as this file is clearly not a trojan but is a joke program.

This email message is just a HOAX, currently we know of no other message that the user will receive about the HOAX as the initial email states.

Below is the actual text from the message that may be received via email:

---------beginning of email copy-------
Thought you might be interested in this message. If you receive an email with a file called "California" do not open the file. The file contains the "WOBBLER" virus.

This information was announced yesterday morning by IBM. The statement says that ... "This is a very dangerous virus, much worse than 'Melissa' and there is NO remedy for it at this time. Some very sick individual has succeeded in using the reformat function from Norton Utilities causing it to completely erase all documents on the hard drive. It has been designed to work with Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. It destroys Macintosh and IBM compatible computers. This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it at this time."

"Please pass this warning to everyone in your address book and share it with all your online friends ASAP so that the destruction it can cause may be minimized."
---------end of email copy-------

Symptoms

Symptoms -

Not applicable.

Method of Infection

Method of Infection -

Not applicable.

Removal -

Removal -

Users should either ignore or delete messages received matching this description.

Variants

Variants -

N/A