weirdami wrote:
I just got an email with a "www.amiga.com" address. It has a file called "your_text.pif", the message says only "Your document is attached.", and the subject is "Re: Your text". I'm sure it's one of those lame virus things, but my question is, how come I got it? AI has that particular address and so does AO. So, either of those has a virus? I'm guessing because I never give out that particular address and it's strangely coincidental that it's amiga related. Who else would know about my Amiga-ness :-), and how would they know it AND have access to my never given out (except for AI, AO) address.
What gives?
I got an email like that just the other day to my email server. I was alerted to a new email with a somewhat hokey attachment matching a windows executable mimetype. I took a look at the source of it considering it was on a BSD box. The other person who knew about the domain couldn't have been infected (he runs Amigas only). I traced the "received" headers and found it was from a computer system off the cox network in northern maryland, where the person who supposedly sent it was from northern Illinois on a different network. The virus takes domains of email addresses from the infected computer system's "address book" and builds new, sometimes fake, email addresses randomly spewing its pif file in hopes of infecting others. From what I could tell, it spits out a new random email address once every 30 seconds.
My recommendations: Don't use anything Outlook for email, instead find a system that works with pop accounts either online or through a system without windows. If you can, deny all attachments, even from friends and use web hosted email addresses for all attachments. Don't allow html email messages, you can easily create viruses in html using an iframe with embeded objects in the resulting frame. If someone (not a news service or bot) uses html email messages, replace all < with "& lt;" (remove the space) and send it back asking for regular text.
:pint:
