RE: OT: Virus(?) help

[<mailinglists@xxxxxxx>]

This is a 'feature' of many recent viri, your address has been found on
someone elses machine (i.e. someone you have sent a mail to at some point
in
the past) and been used that to send messages with the senders address
spoofed to look like they came from you.  These mails have nothing to do
with you, you have just been caught in the crossfire.
If the companies/etc who are running these 'helpful' virus scanners on
their
systems knew anything about them at all, they would know this too and just
bin the email, rather that 'helpfully' sending you an email to let you know
you've got a virus, which you haven't! Aargh!
I've cleaned up a few sites recently, one had 700+ of these mails over the
course of a week, the best one was nearer 2000 mails over a weekend... Both
of these are very small companies.
If you are on broadband just delete them, you may be able to set up a rule
to bin them. If you are on dial-up, download Ultrafunks PopCorn email
program, less than 1meg, it lets you delete them direct from the mailserver
without downloading the message bodies. With luck it should calm down in a
week or so...

Good Luck!


-----Original Message-----
From: Malcolm Surgenor [mailto:malcolm@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 02 December 2003 18:43
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] OT: Virus(?) help



I know it's off thread but hopefully one of you guys can point me in the
right direction.  I came home tonight to find about 50 e-mails from people
I've never heard off returning an e-mail I supposedly sent to them because
it contained a virus (w32.bugbear.b.dam). Some, who obviously didn't have
virus protection themselves, just returned it saying I'd sent an e-mail to
them in error.

Firstly, I've always considered myself well protected with an up to date
copy of Norton running on all my machines together with ZoneAlarm Pro.
Indeed Norton caught the virus in any of the e-mails that just retuned the
original e-mail including the virus.

The e-mail they were returning looked as thought it came from my domain but
it used an address that I have never used (it used the name Charlie and
there is no Charlie in my family!).  How can someone send out an e-mail
using my domain name / e-mail address.

Many of the retuned e-mails were from automatic virus checkers but I find
it
extremely embarrassing that all these people think that I sent them an
infected e-mail!

Malcolm