SULFNBK.EXE (short for Setup Utility for Long File Name Backup) is an internal component of the
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
(in
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...
and
Windows ME
Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (marketed with the pronunciation of the pronoun "me"), is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is the successor to Windo ...
) for restoring
long file name
Long filename (LFN) support is Microsoft's backward-compatible extension of the 8.3 filename (short filename) naming scheme used in DOS. Long filenames can be more descriptive, including longer filename extensions such as .jpeg, .tiff, .html, a ...
s.
Email hoax
The component became famous in the early 2000s as the subject of an
e-mail
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
hoax
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...
.
[Sulfnbk.exe Hoax Virus information https://help.aol.com/articles/sulfnbkexe-hoax-virus-information] The hoax claimed that SULFNBK.EXE was a
virus
A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea.
Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1 ...
, and contained instructions to locate and delete the file. While the instructions worked, they were needless and (in some rare cases, for example, when the long file names are damaged and need to be restored) can cause disruptions, as SULFNBK.EXE is not a virus, but instead an operating system component.
Even people who didn't receive the e-mail were still perplexed if they found the file by themselves (because of its quickly hand-drawn icon), thinking that it could be a virus or
trojan horse
The Trojan Horse was a wooden horse said to have been used by the Greeks during the Trojan War to enter the city of Troy and win the war. The Trojan Horse is not mentioned in Homer's ''Iliad'', with the poem ending before the war is concluded, ...
.
In Windows 98 and ME, where the file existed, SULFNBK.EXE can be found in Windows "COMMAND" directory (a directory that contains command line tools, usually ).
A very similar hoax happened with
jdbgmgr.exe.
References
External links
Cara menghapus Aplikasi Di Laptop(Completely Uninstall the Program)
(Symantec)
SULFNBK Hoax virus profile(McAfee)
Sophos hoax description: SULFNBK(Sophos)
F-Secure Hoax Information Pages: Sulfnbk.exe virus hoax(F-Secure)
sulfnbk.exe virus(Vmyths.com)
SULFNBK.EXE: Should the Windows file SULFNBK.EXE be deleted because it masks a dormant virus?(Snopes.com)
{{Windows commands
Windows administration
Windows files
Virus hoaxes