[email protected]

[Allan Carreg (imported)]

Has anyone else had an email from a [email protected] saying "Kill the writer of this document! There's an attachment called part4.zip that I timidly refrained from opening.

Yahoo filed it in the bulk folder, and I suspect he got my email address from the eunuch archive.

If anybody was interepid and foolhardy enough to open the document I'd be curious to know what it was.

Last time I was mad (read wasted) enough to open an attachment from a stranger I ended up with "istarthere" and it was a devil to get rid of.

I sent a reply to this John indicating that I no longer opened attachments from strangers even from an auspicious site like bme, but it bounced. I guess that's a bad sign.

Cheerio

Allan

[Bboy]

Always remember that viruses almost always spoof the "from" header in emails ... meaining that if there is a john @ bme that most likely he had nothing whatsoever to do with email.

If you get something like that, the best thing to do is to just delete it ... otherwise poor John gets emails that he know absolutely nothing about.

[Riverwind (imported)]

This is not only a problem at BME but I have recieved several from different members of the [email protected], I know this is wrong because we dont send email from eunuch.org, only recieve it.

So boys and girls be carful opening your email and always delete it if you dont know who it is.

Internet 101.

RW

[A-1 (imported)]

Hello again, my friends...

It is my understanding that the virus that is going around that you are talking of comes as an attachment that has to be opened for it to infect your computer. I understand that there is some sort of password that you must put in it to activate it, although I am not sure about that part.

This particular scenerio makes it transparent to the scanning process of the antivirus programs from various services.

If you open this thing it sends itself to others listed in your e-mails and infects your computer though not necessarily in that order.

It is a good practice to delete ALL of the little white envelope attachments that you get. If you must see the contents, have whoever sent it to you send it without "bundling" it into an attachment.

A-1

[bobov (imported)]

I recently received two messages from the network mailer saying that e-mails from my computer couldn't reach unknown addresses. The problem is that I had never sent either of those messages. So my computer was sending e-mails without my knowledge! This led me to learn about "trojans" - short for trojan horse. These are programs that are covertly planted on your computer. Sometimes they're put there by companies looking to collect data about the web pages you visit to create a profile of your interests for use by marketers. Sometimes they're put there by spammers or pornographers to use your computer to send their e-mails. This conceals the true source of the spam or pornography, evading efforts at filtering or detection. According to press reports, this has become the standard operating procedure for spammers, who make use of tens of thousands of PCs without the knowledge or consent of their owners. This is an egregious violation of privacy; it can slow your computer because it makes such heavy use of CPU and communication resources; and it can get you in trouble if your PC is identified as a sender of spam or pornography.

What to do about it? There are many software packages available to remove trojans. Some are free; some are for sale; they vary widely in quality. I went to Microsoft's information base to see what they would say. Microsoft recommends that its customers use the anti-trojan software from Lavasoft (Ad-aware 6.0). See http://www.lavasoftusa.com Microsoft extols the quality of this software, and it's free. You can download the software, and frequent updates are available. It takes about 1/2 hour to read the manual and set options. Then it's easy. There were 139 trojans on my PC! Ad-aware lets you check the characteristics of each potential trojan, selecting which ones you want eliminated. Each trojan is archived before being eliminated, in case you want to restore it later (some commercial applications will only work if the trojan does). I also spared two trojans from Microsoft that looked benign.

Get rid of the trojans on your PC, and many of the problems described in this thread will disappear. Anti-virus software is ineffective against trojans. Also, if you use a Microsoft operating system, make sure that you've installed all of the critical security updates available at Windows Update http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp

[Bboy]

I just want to re-iterate that none of the symptoms listed in this thread mean that your computer is infected.

It's very easy to spoof, or fake, the from address of an email and that is what happens in almost 100% of the virus cases. Even if the email didn't come from your computer, if it had your address as the originating address you would still get the mail delivery failure notifications.

Your best defense is to run a good antivirus program. I recomment AVG from a company called Grisoft at http://www.grisoft.com

It's cheap, effective, and most importantly I have never had it interfere with the operation of mm computers or other software, a claim that I can't make with Norton or McAfee.

[bobov (imported)]

Bboy, thanks for the lesson about viruses. I do use McAfee, and have never had any trouble with it. I meant well in my post about trojans. I just wanted to share something that was new to me and seemed useful. Even if it's not tied to the issue discussed in this thread, I would still recommend that people check it out. One of the trojans on my computer was a porn mailer, and I don't think most people would want their computer to be doing that.

[Christina (imported)]

I do run a firewall and virus protection software, but I am concerned about having spyware in my PC. I'm going to look into some sort of program soon. Thank's for the tips.

[bobov (imported)]

Chistina, you're a dear.

[A-1 (imported)]

Christina,

Here, check this out!

http://www.eunuch.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=4541

It is free, too!

A-1