virii, worms and other sundries…

i started my computer industry work back in 1990 when many people in the industry would have been somewhat excited to get a real live virus on their computer.

these days, it’s amazing to me the number of folks who do not invest in simple virus protection - or worse, who buy the programs and fail to keep them up to date.

every day, my FIX mail is full of email rejections notices - you know, they say “your mail to _____ was not delivered because it contains one or more viruses or trojans” or whatever… i probably get about 30 or 40 of those on a good day. the fun thing is the email address these bounce back to, our fix chicks tips email address, is NOT a real email address. it’s an alias. we couldn’t actually send anyone email FROM that address if we wanted to… so why do we get all these bounced messages?

very simply put, someone (or several someones) browsing our site has an infected computer. THEY are sending these emails.

here’s how it works:
email-based virii and trojans are quite self-reliant. they pack their own SMTP programs and they mail themselves with efficiency mr. spock would be proud of. about two years ago some smart cookie came up with the idea to pull email addresses, not from the outlook address book (everyone does that) but out of the computer’s temporary internet files - the cache. the cache stores images of every page a person visits… everywhere a person browses on the internet where there’s a text-based email link in the clear (not encrypted or hidden) gest saved in the cache…

when the virus gets ready to mail itself out, it pulls randomly assorted email addresses from the browser cache and inserts one in the FROM field and one in the TO field. then using its self-contained SMTP program, it takes over the computer’s internet connection and starts mailing itself out, disguised as email coming from some random name from a site that person has been to. the only way to find out for sure where the virus laden email came from is to trace the IP address in the header, of it’s not corrupted by the time you see the email.

usually the first clue a non-protected user has that they are infected with this kind of computer disease is that their hi-speed internet connection isn’t… things drag and slow down to a crawl. a look at the transmission lights on the cable modem or DSL modem will tell you that even though you aren’t doing anything, your computer is VERY busy.

when virii get to be intelligent enough that they’ll sit in the background and not run until the computer is idle, like say, overnight, it will be even harder for un-protected users to figure out they have a problem.

if you have a computer, you need a virus prevention program. take heed and take your pick - i’m not endorsing any of these - i just went to a search tool and entered “virus scanner.”

www.stop-sign.com
www.antivirus.com
www.pandasoftware.com
www.symantec.com
www.mcafee.com
www.kaspersky.com
www.ravantivirus.com
www.norman.com
www.trendmicro.com

several of these places have free online one-time scans for particular bugs but you will do yourself (and the rest of us) a favor if you buy a full-fledged anti-virus package and keep it updated…

- pretty please?