Clever Virus
First seen on Gavin’s blog and now Photo Matt:
I’ve gotten a pile of these in the last few days - sometimes the subject/message is a bit different, but it always has an attached file with a 5 number password. My virus scanner isn’t always finding a virus in the file, but I haven’t unzipped or opened anything to find out what’s in them! Some of the activity report lists that I’ve received Beagle.H@mm and Beagle.J@mm.
So be on the lookout for odd emails like this! Don’t open attachments until you know that the person would be sending you a file. If you do want to know what the file is, save it to your hard drive and then scan that file with your virus scanner - it may confirm that’s what it is. And if you really aren’t sure, email the friend and say "did you send me an attachment? I’m just making sure before I open it." They’ll thank you in the long run for showing that cautious is okay, even if the attachment was on the up-and-up.
My newest email on this says:
Email account utilization warning.
from staff[at]love-productions.com
Hello user of Love-productions.com e-mail server,We warn you about some attacks on your e-mail account. Your computer may contain viruses, in order to keep your computer and e-mail account safe, please, follow the instructions.
For further details see the attach.
In order to read the attach you have to use the following password: 70215.
Sincerely,
The Love-productions.com team http://www.love-productions.com
attachement is called Norton AntiVirus Deleted1.txt, so I’m assuming my scanner caught this one as an actual virus
Pretty tricky. Not so nice. Don’t be fooled!!
Comments
luckily i’ve only gotten it once, but my virus scan didn’t catch it either.
not cool.
Posted by: reb | March 4, 2004 04:39 AM
the obnoxious thing? I got one of these emails from erika@onedomainIown.com to erika@anotherdomainIown.com - I’m sending viruses to myself! AUGH!
So much for Norton. Bah.
Posted by: erika | March 4, 2004 04:53 AM
I haven’t gotten any of those, but I did get an email from someone who got one from me--as in, someone had spoofed one of my email addresses in the header of the message. Annoying.
Posted by: Erica | March 4, 2004 08:04 AM
I think that it may not be attaching a virus every time, just a random file—but I haven’t opened one to see. ;)
Posted by: kristine | March 4, 2004 10:42 AM
Oh, I didn’t think about this before, but Melissa said that virus scanners don’t always scan zip files with passwords on them... which is probably why my scanner wasn’t catching anything in all of them.
Posted by: kristine | March 4, 2004 01:10 PM