Here we go again.

My website is currently under attack from yet another low-life piece of sh*t by dozens of virus containing emails.

I am sure I'm not alone but as the emails contain the (forged) identities of many well and less well known names in FS it looks as though the FS community is being targetted.

SO BE WARNED ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE A WEBSITE OF YOUR OWN.

The idiot behind it is not very clever and is using a simple attachment method. It's easy to spot and look for the following giveaways.

- Any subject line that starts Re: Re:
- Any attachment that contains a file ending in {xyz}.bat
- Any attachment ending in {xyz}.pif
- Any attachment ending in {xyz}.scr
- Any attachment ending in {xyz).exe

(where {xyz} is a file name)

In any case you should NEVER open any such attachment even when they come from someone you APPEAR to know.

The emails have subjects like

Re: Thank you
Re: Your details
Re: Approved
Re: That Movie  and so on

ANYWAY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Roger

  I've got about 15 of them now.

I've been getting a number of emails with 'attachments'. I have no idea what any of them are or were, but I'm sure some must have been 'virus's.

Not on a webpage but just in my personal email.

It'll do them no good with me. I never, ever open an email that has an attachment, unless I have specifically asked for it from someone I know to be ok, and even then, I'm very careful.

I have had alot of the 'You've just been approved' ones.

Just as a point of interest, I'll be posting a business webpage shortly, where people will be emailing an order form to me. It will be through my Web host who has a SSL facility for me to use. Can someone attach or somehow 'infect' my order form with something and then send it to me so that it will look like any other form that is returned to me? If so what can I do to guard against this?

P.S. Is there any penalty if one of the morons happens to be caught. Does anyone know of a case where a 'Virus spreader' has been caught?.....What happened?
Does he still have balls...........or in the case of a woman......does she still have a ****.   

I had a virus yesterday, it first succeded in disableing my norton, then it somehow took over my hotmail email. Probably through msn messenger. It was automatically sending out virused emails at random to people. I kept on getting returned emails about every 3 minutes saying the email couldn't be sent because hotmail virus scanner detected a virus on it. Hopefully none of them got through their virus scanner. It took me about 7 hours to clean the virus. Everytime I got Norton up and running it was disabled again. Then it said I had to re-install it. Gave me quite a headache.

well the only good news on this is it expires in two weeks or sept 10th

Today I was hit with about 150 of them for the first time. It took me ages just to get through all the virus reports from Norton.
Just wondering, does viewing the message actually do any harm or do you have to open the attachments???

One last question, can Firewalls protect your computer from this type of bombardment???  ???
Biggles

I don't know anything about these things or the protection methods, but they have a firewall at the office I work at occasionally. They had the Internet 'offline' last week, because they said the firewall was down for some reason.

So the firewall apparently does give a degree of protection otherwise they wouldn't have taken the Internet offline.

Personally, I thought that if you had the most up to date Norton, you would be safe (the program would catch it and warn you) except for the most recent virus's that weren't included in the latest updates.
Is this a fair assumption? 

Apparently the problem goes beyond the FS world...

http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=tech&cat=computer_viruses_and_worms