Yup, it's that time again. Your biweekly (it seems) virus mess has just hit the oscillating air impeller. (a phrase stolen from Jim). This time the antivirus folks can't even agree on what to call it, (Novarq? MyDoom?) but there is one significant difference to this batch. The scum that wrote it have finally started using effective social engineering to increase the infection rate.
I was afraid this was gonna happen.
Up until now, virus-infected emails were pretty obvious things to stay away from for most careful computer users. This time though, the virus laden messages convincingly appear to be system generated email delivery errors regarding a message sent by someone you know. And even more significantly, the dangerous attachments show up with benign-looking icons, like the standard Windows .txt file icon, leading one to think they actually are what they say they are. Unfortunately, what's happened is the virus vermin have figured out how to spoof or fake the icons, which have actually been applied to an executable file.
The thing about this infestation that the people I support are most confused about is why they keep getting bounced or undeliverable messages from peoploe they don't know and never wrote.
This does not (necessarily) mean you are infected and there's nothing you can do about people who receive the messages thinking you're spreading the virus. All the recent email viruses (no, virii is not the plural, go ask your Latin teacher) have spread by searching your entire hard drive for anything resembling an email address. The virus then uses it's own built-in email engine to send itself to all those addresses, and uses a random selection of those addresses as the from address as well. That means that if your email appears anywhere on someone else's infected system, you will likely receive the virus email, and others will likely receive it as if it had been sent by you. This is particularily a problem for bloggers, since the virus looks in the internet cache where visited pages are stored and could easily pull your address from your stored blog page.)
There's nothing you can do about this except make certain your system isn't generating the same shit. Other than that, just delete the emails you receive, as well as the bounced messages, without opening.
Because a number of the people for whom I provide computer support read here, I'm going to repeat the essential advice for virus protection.
First, if you are connected to the Intenet and are not using a trustworthy, currently updated antivirus program, you are essentially Typhoid Mary. Not only are you begging for personal disaster, but you are making life miserable for the rest of us. Smarten up! (and if you honestly can't afford an antivirus program, there are several free version that are quite good too, so you have no excuse. AVG Anti Virus is one I've set up for several people, or you can Google for others.)
Second, the rule regarding email attachments is simple. Do not ever open an attachment from anyone unless you specifically requested it. Period. Yes, that means you may lose out on the odd cute joke from a friend etc, but are you willing to risk system damage for the odd bit of fluff? Didn't think so. If you really are dying to open it, email or call the sender to confirm it's contents. And on the other side of the coin, don't send unsolicited attachments yourself either. If necessary, email the intended recipient first & let them know it's coming and why.
<side rant>
Are you one of those people who forwards every cute little joke or chain letter you receive to everyone in your address book? Then knock it off! Get yourself a blog & post them there so people can read 'em if they want. The simple truth is almost nobody you forward them to reads them, and in fact they find them really annoying. But they don't want to hurt your feelings by telling you to cut it out. So I'm telling you, as nicely as possible. Knock. It. Off. Seriously. </side rant>
In addition to the hassle of deleting potentially hundreds of virus-generated emails a day, and the overloading and slowdown of email delivery servers, (it's currently estimated 30% of all emails carry the virus) we're all gonna get hit with more problems starting on Feb 1st. as the whole Internet potentially slows to a crawl.
The virus is going to use infected machines to attempt a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against a much maligned software company. (No, not Microsoft, a company named SCO) In addition to all the bogus email data already filling up the pipe, infected machines will add massive traffic designed to crash the servers at the targeted website. I assume the guys at SCO are smart enough to protect their server, but all that wasted traffic is gonna make the average user's experience of the Internet substantially slower for the 2 weeks the attack is supposed to continue.
So don't be part of the problem. Update your antivirus definitions daily for the next couple of days at least (email me if you need help) and don't open any damn attachments!
Update: More bad news. Of course some asshat has released a variant of the virus that will also try to attack Microsoft's website, so the amount of traffic will pretty much double again. The worst part of this variant is it also seems to do a pretty good job of blocking an infected machine's ability to access the Antivirus companies' websites, as well as Windows Update and Office Update. That means that, once infected, you won't be able to access the very sites that could help you clean up the infection. Sheee-it. What a mess.
