VIRUS ALERT !

Ken_8

Just spent two hours recovering from a virus attack. The e-mail was from Sid Harvey's. Since I took issue with the fact that they had lost a tax exempt certificate for a church we bought some parts for, I assumed the store sending the e-mail was legit. The note said, "you are bad." Which of course I am (:-o)

In the attachment was a file icon and the words "msg.exe". Before opening, I even "replied", asking the sender to verify that they had actually sent the e-mail but lost track of a response and accidently opened it. Within 2 seconds my active Norton anti-virus icon dropped off my task bar and my hard drive went nuts.

Through Outlook Express I was able to get to the Norton Website and started looking around and found a link for outside "inspection" which yielded the pathway to a fix.

After loading the fix and a full Norton virus scan, all seems well and clean.

I have been bombarded with 20 or so weird e-mails a week with screwy looking attachments that I simply never opened and deleted. The one from Sid Harvey looked so good I did not open it directly - but put it on the desktop and then asked my just updated Norton to scope it out. It suggested the file was not a problem - so I opened it. Once opened, I could not delete it, Norton was removed and disabled and thankfully the website bailed me out.

Be careful. As we all know, it's not the e-mail that's the problem. It's the attachment.

Amazingly, my firewall and router were of no consequence.

Guys, Watch what you open! Anybody hit lately?

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Mark Eatherton1

Not hit but...

have seen a BIG increase in the unknown sender emails with attachments. I got a notice the other day that an employee of the IRS had received an email from me with a virus attached.

Wonder who I P.O.'d...

ME

Earthfire

doom worm

I've gotten about 4 of them sent to me in the last month. Luckily they got caught by my firewall. but I did run the worm cleaner a couple of times and it did find one lurking in my spam folder that hadn't been deleted yet. If the weenies that come up with this junk spent half the energy coming up with useful things for the net the world would be a much better place. JMHO

Mad Dog

at least you are computer-saavy enough to fix

it yourself....when mine went down I didn't have a clue. I ran the computer till it stopped like my trucks. The guy that finally fixed it said it was the worst virus-laden computer he had ever seen..it took 4 days to sort everything out. I had no protection whatsoever. I learned the hardway. Glad to hear yours is back. Mad Dog

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jerry scharf

forged email from addresses

these new email viruses have picked up a new trick. They pick one email address from the infected machine's list and send a mail to that. They pick a different email in that list and forge the from address. This makes it harder for the untrained user to spot the culprit machine.

I happen to run mulberry on Linux for mail, and I never seem to get any viruses. The advantage of having an almost unmeasurable market share it that no one thinks it's worth the hack value to go after this type of setup.

jerry

Ken_8

Thanks

MD

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Shelby

There is another one making its rounds

It acts the same as mydoom. Our anivirus program has caught it 11 times since friday. Its called W32 Netsky B@mm. It is another mass mailing worm. Norton has its theat level at 4 so watch for it.

JimGPE_3

Yep

I got hit with this one, but our Norton AV software caught it before it could do any damage.

Dave Yates (PAH)

more than two dozen today!

One even had my own e-mail as its origin(G). Tain't possible as all incoming and outgoing mail gets scanned.

Never open an attachment you haven't specifically requested.

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Joannie

Especially *.exe

Never open an attachment with ".exe" on the end, no matter who it's from. That means it's an executable file, and there aren't many reasons for anyone to send you an executable file. Any ".exe" should immediately send a red flag up.