Webmasters And Computer Viruses

[Mike AI]

OK First it started with RichC, but now I am getting hit with viruses from every webmaster.... Come on guys get Norton or something.

Dravyck last one came from you tonight

ject:
Fw:michael,welcome to my hometown
Date:
Sat, 15 Feb 2003 20:14:42 -0800
From:
dravyk
To:
michael@ oprano.com

[The Other Steve]

That's alright Mike - I sometimes get viruses from myself and my box gets swept every night.

Those guys probably don't have infected boxes - but somebody who has their email addresses does.

[sextoyking]

yep Mike, I have been using Norton for years, that baby is always doing the live updates.

most of those emails are like a circle jerk, they just keep going around and around.

mabey try out spam assasian??

[Lisa]

Steve is right, Michael. One of the 'features' of the klez virus and others like it is that they use as the 'from' address, any email address that is somehow stored in any way in your email client. In address books, in copies to self, etc

So the original sender of your email from Dravyk could be any one who has ever sent or received email from him.

If you don't use Outlook for mail, you can't be infected, and more importantly, because these viruses exploit a vulnerability in Outlook in order to self-send, even if you did inadvertantly execute the virus file, you wouldn't be sending it on.

[art]

Originally posted by Mike AI@Feb 16 2003, 12:40 AM
[...] I am getting hit with viruses from every webmaster....

Mike,

Ask one of the techs to install a virus scanner on your mailserver, that simply drops all emails that contain a virus.

I did that a couple of months ago on my mailserver, when I got really sick and tired of receiving 50 virus emails per day. Now I never see a virus at all anymore, unless I look at the virus scanner's logfile on the server (still catches about 10 per day).

It was getting really annoying, and only cost me an hour or so to totally get rid of it. An hour well spent!

Greetings,

Art

That's right. Trevor installed a virus scanner and a really good spam filter on our mail server and unless the virus jerks come up with new extensions, I never get virus attachments.

When they do invent new extensions every so often, he just adds them to the list. We filter out just about everything, so if I need to get an attachment from someone, I have a special email address that isn't used for anything else ever, meaning that no one coulcd get it off the net, and stuff is sent that way.

If you're interested in one, I can ask Trevor what he used. The "Spam Assasin" works pretty darned well, too. It gets about 75% of all my spams and dumps them in my trash.

[Dianna Vesta]

I use to love using Outlook and replied on it to manage my business for follow-up, appointments, search, etc. When you get as much mail as I do, you need a good mail program.

I had to stop using it and now only check my email with a web based (yahoo) email. I pay for this.

I just got sick of watching Norton pop-up all the time with viruses it couldn't fix. Not only that it really slows your work down when it's checking every email you're sending as well as receiving.

On top of that you have a personal firewall and 100 things going on at one time.

get a mac you dont have to worry to much about viruses then

[RawAlex]

do, there are almost no mac viruses because they can't find two of them to share a virus with!

Outlook is okay, provided you do the following:

1 - don't accept any attachments.
2 - turn off the preview pane
3 - you go to microsoft site weekly and update you system (which if you are running windows, you should anyway)
4 - don't use outlook express, use outlook 2000 or outlook 2002 that comes with office.

The exploit Klez uses has been known for a year, and microsoft has had a patch for that long. The problem exists only because people don't update their systems.

Klex and many other viruses now use either the content of the address book or email addresses stored in webpages cached on the hard drive to not only select victims but also to fake the "from" part of the header. The idea is to create total chaos and get people pissed off at each other.

Apparently it works.

Alex