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Bud Frogs
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Dateline: 07/15/98 The Budweiser Frogs are still with us. Anheuser-Busch may have retired them from its TV spots in favor of a pair of wise-cracking reptiles, but the infamous animatronic croakers have survived digitally in the form of a popular interactive screen saver and a persistent Internet virus hoax of the same name. Originally offered in 1996 as a free download from Budweiser.com, the Bud Frogs Screen Saver was an instant hit – too big a hit for some people's tastes, apparently, because in mid-1997 an anonymous Internet prankster conceived the following hoax:
That was one of the earliest versions of the message. The form of it – especially the manner in which the file name, size, and download time are listed – suggests that the warning originated on America Online. It spread rapidly across the Internet by email, showing up repeatedly on mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups, only to be pooh-poohed by virus experts such as those at DataFellows and McAfee. Various versions of the hoax are still circulating, one year later. One of the more recent variants looks like this:
Note the new additions to the text – a pseudo-journalistic writing style and the claim that the warning was based on an announcement by Steve Case, founder and CEO of America Online. Information Week published a denial by AOL on June 17. In most ways, the Bud Frogs alert is a typical virus hoax, with its request to forward the message to "as many people as possible," the familiar warning that the contents of your hard drive will be destroyed, and the over-emphatic typography (I counted 12 exclamation points!!!!!!). It's more believable than most, however, because the virus is said to reside in an executable file rather than in the text of an email (the latter being impossible). Note that the stated file size of the program is fairly small, just 25K. A copy of the actual screen saver that I located on the Web and downloaded (with no ill effects, I might add) weighed in at 860K. I should also report that a usually-reliable source recently informed me that there is a real password-stealing program being passed around AOL with a similar file name – "budfrogs.exe" or "budfrogs.shs." I haven't been able to confirm that information elsewhere, but it bears repeating that it's always a risky business to download and execute email attachments from people you don't know. Further reading:
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