christmas poems, christmas greetings and doom

I think I saw how the next attack is coming yesterday.

It was in the form of a Christmas poem. I received it at work from one of my co-workers by e-mail. To sum it up, it was a poem about a guy who was sitting on the couch on Christmas Eve and his wife had fallen asleep on his shoulder. The kids were tucked away snug in their beds with visions of sugarplums (or Play stations) dancing in their heads.

Anyway, the guy hears something out on the lawn. He springs from the couch to see what was the matter. Instead of seeing a jolly old elf, a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer, he sees an American soldier doing sentry duty in the front yard, protecting his freedom.

The poem went on to remind us how there are American soldiers standing watch over our freedom all over the world this holiday season and we should be grateful. This is, of course, all true and we should. You’re not going to get an argument on this blogsite. The sentiment of this poem is absolutely correct and there is no way a reasonable man or woman could disagree.

The e-mail said that we should forward this poem to anyone we knew.

After I read the poem, I went back and followed the string. It looked as if hundreds of people had seen it. It had been forwarded to what seemed like everyone in several of the previous senders’ address books.

“Well, Jimbo,” one or two of you are probably asking, “why didn’t you forward it to me?”

Those of you that know me well know that I don’t forward frivolous e-mails. It’s because I believe that is where the next attack is coming from.

We have some fairly sophisticated anti-virus software that we can buy and load into our computers. Most of our Internet service providers provide such a service, too. One of the things that anti-virus software does is to keep worms and viruses from spreading. One of the ways that worms and viruses spread is that they give your computer a command to send a virus you may have caught to everyone in your address book. Anti-virus programs try to prevent that. One way of circumventing that is for the user of a computer to give the command, themselves—by forwarding an e-mail to someone else, or everyone they know.

If a terrorist can imbed a virus or worm into a little dancing Santa Claus or a prancing reindeer that flashes “Happy Holidays- send this to everyone you know,” it can be a time bomb waiting to explode. If they can get you to pass along their doomsday virus to everyone in your home and work computer’s address book, the virus can just hibernate in your computer, waiting for the day Al Qaeda has predestinated to shut down our system of communications—or worse.

Maybe when Al Qaeda attacks, my computer will be the one that is still working.

Or, maybe not.

At least that is the view from Jimbo’s world this morning.