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

love to see them get past norton antivirus 2003 i have full faith in that program and it monitors emails and file downlaods aswell

No, firewalls don't stop viruses. They are there to stop hackers getting direct access to your network (or PC) while it's connected direct to the Internet - very common now that people have DSL, Broadband and stuff via cable, PST line, satellite.

So a firewall won't protect you from a virus. Neither will a virus prog if it's not being regularly updated - like every 1-2 days!!

I got nearly 6 days work from a client who was running a well-known corporate AV prog (in the UK) and was hit twice in succession a few days apart by 2 separate viruses. The supplier said that it was bad luck because the viruses had hit before the scheduled updates had been issued!

Don't forget that AV progs are not 'catch-alls' - they are virus specific. It's no good relying on the McAfee virus scan prog that came free with your version of Windoes 4 years ago - it's now worse than useless because it gives you a false sense of security.

If you need a PROPER free AV prog note the following.

Go to www.grisoft.com

Download their FREE single user prog. It works - REALLY WELL to professional standard - and you get FREE updates. Stuff Norton!

It's common for viruses to be progd to attack AV software now.

The best form of defence is USE YOUR EYES AND COMMONSENSE

Most common viruses come in via email attachments. In my opening post I told how to avoid opening attachments that will put a virus on your system

My virus DATS are one day old. Apparently no updates yet. No matter, I don't open attachments unless I asked for them...the firewall does help if the trojan wants to connect to the internet and youdon;t even know what the program is. I once got a pictures EXE from a friend. It was supposed to extract the pictures with the exe, kind of what winzip does, and my firewall goes nuts telling me it wants to connect to the internet. As you may know, I blocked it forever!!!!!!!Mua ha ha ha!

God you have got to be joking me!!.....

I have like 10 e-mails. One from SimMarket....and a link to download some sort of receipt....except the file ends in .php It is called ticket create.php....OMG Like I got something from simMarket....and the others saying that my e-mail was not sent to download the attacthement for original mail. Funny thing is it said an e-mail I sent to someone with Earthlink, and no one I know is with Earthlink..........I am not complaining, but how stupid could these people be? I mean..come on!

Oh oh, and another one from Frank from Gateway!!! OMG I am luaghing so damn hard.

Quote:


I will rush right over to your link sending me to some other site....NOT

And this one which caught my eye:

Quote:


Anyone in these here forums, do not download any of my attachments because they are simply not mine. Thanks.

Be nice if we could find who's behind it and send some of the Boys from Simviation round to his place for a chat.......


BTW - do you need virus detectors where the sun doesn't shine?

(another quaint British expression!)

Well now that I've seen this I'm happy my Dad's company is based here at home, our LAN has some of the best civilian antivirus software in the world, but still he's already received 7 Sobig.F emails this morning. 

The wierd thing about the virus I got is that I don't know how I got it. I've never had one before and I know all the rules and safety procedures to protect against getting one. The entire day yesterday my email was empty.  I have a really strong firewall so I dont think anybody could have hacked into my computer and dumped it. About 10 minutes before norton detected a virus I had downloaded about 50 files from project ai. I doubt any of that would have been infected though.

Im at a loss as to how I got it.

lol it's cool Daniel...it was said with a comic tone.  Unfortunately, in text a lot of meaning is lost just in the person's tone and inflections...

No worries dude...

Last night I was convinced I had it.  Now I'm convinced I never did have it.

I got about 100 emails last night and who knows how many this morning - I had to just empty the entire inbox.

I ran every scan/fix/search possible and couldn't find anything, so there was nothing to fix.  About 4 hours ago all the emails stopped.

Get one of the fixes and if it says you aren't infected you probably aren't.  You're just getting mail from people who are.

someone def must have found a way to slow it down or stop it thank god

Yeah, looks as though the worst of the 'virus storm' is over. How dya do?

I'm pretty sure 1 or 2 of us will have ben affected but hopefully most will have got off pretty much scott free.

Talking about dealing with these pathetic sh*ts, maybe they'll do that themselves.

Everyone (if they have any sense at all) has got some kind of AV software now - if not why not, it's free (see my earlier post). And most of us just laughed when we saw what was happening.

So perhaps that's it. There ain't no NEW viruses coming along (as far as I know) - they're just variations on tired old themes. So pretty soon there will just be no point in wasting your time doing it.

Maybe I'm wrong and there always will be enough of these little jerks around (you know the kind - like to break up bus stop shelters and kick litter bins across the road) but only time will tell.

But let's hope if the 'authorities' are able to get their hands on a few of them the punishment WILL fit the crime.

BTW

Here's something else you might want to try. I'm using a free prog called Frontgate. It's really an anti-spam prog that works in the background and 'learns' what to put thru to you and what to delete from your ISP's server even before it gets to you.

I've got it working in 'visible' mode while it's learning my preferences so I could see all of these virus containing emails ON MY ISP's SERVER and delete them even before they got to me.

Take a look at it!

Guys, keep it cool. There are about 1,000 people working on this case. Several F.B.I. Computer Crime agents work on these cases. It is a felony, which means a minimum sentance of one year, and, the person who is found guilty by a court, well, they can kiss about 50 years away. Don't get too upset.

Also, beware, there are MANY more "subjects" that are infected.

Some of them are as follows (As reported to the Sheriff's Office)

Thank You
Your Application
Your Requested Material
Your New Account
Your Account Details
Stop Junk Mail - Free
Nortan Anti-Virus - Free Updates (Spelling is wrong, should be Norton)
Your Account Summary
Your Results
Free Viagra

Great list Scupapro, I'll program these new ones into Outlook too.

We should compile a list like that for people and stick it up top in the Software forum.

But what happens if you sign up for something and they send you your password by email with the subject title, "Your New Account"?   

This is the SoBig virus guys in case you already don't know. It spoofs addresses on the infected computers and sends out junk to overload the Internet.

There is no personal attack. It is just that some computers that are not protected have been used as middle men to broadcast these e-mails to lists of addresses that reside on them. In most cases, the users don't even realize what is going on with their machines. It comes mostly from users that either don't have av on their machines or don't keep their pattern files up to date.

You can read about the viruses and worms we have been contending with over the last few days here:

http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/

Keep your av pattern files up to date and use a good firewall. If you are one of these guys I have heard about who doesn't have av installed because "it slows my connection down" or "I don't have time" or "I can't afford it" then you are probably the person who is enabling these virus cretins to do their business. No virus distributor is going to be the one to mount the attack. All they do is scan for ports on on-line machines, when they find an open one they go in and plant their bugs. If the bug is discovered by an av program it is gone. If not, it does its work when it is scheduled to or when it is contacted to do so by the main distributor.

If you keep your av pattern files up to date and use real time scan when you are on line, you will not have any trouble.

If you "run bare" you are either going to get infected, you are now infected, or you are going to infect someone else.

Some good news - There has been a break in the case, somebody found an I.P. address. Keep it quiet, but I will keep you all  informed.

I have the McAfee Virus-scan and it comes with HAWK, a component that monitors what is being sent through my outlook.....if it notices that e-mail is being sent to more 25 percent of my contacts ( I set the percentage ) and the whole thing freeze until I set to send it or not. I love it.  I sent 4 attachments to a friend once and it alerted me

I keep getting one every day that seems suspicious to me. It comes with an attachment.

The sender is 'Got StudentLoan?' and the subject field is 'ReduceYourPayments'.

As I said, I never do anything but delete everything I'm not perfectly sure I ask for. (Anyone who mants me badly enough, that I would want to talk to, has my phone number!!

I must admit that I did not run McAfee all the time, only when I was on the Net. The reason was that many of my programs (especially CFS2), were very slow and I needed as much Ram as I could muster. I have downloaded the AVG program suggested by RollerBall, and it seems to be more comprehensive and easier to understand than McAfee, which came with my Windows Millenium OP.
As of today, I have solved the long standing problem of the Compaq Pressario RAM strip.  I now have 384 MB of RAM. So I can run AV all the time now.

(P.S. For anyone interested, I have posted in the 'Hardware' forum under 'Finally, some Compaq RAM'.
I have included the explainatuion as to why all the chips I tried never worked, and why the one I have now, does.)  

Hey Foz,

I do the same, I don't keep anything in the address book. But to save time and trouble, I keep a Notepad Doc. with all the names and addresses in 'MY Documents'.
It's in Alphabetical order, so all I have to do is copy and paste from that. It saves having to individually type out each addressee, and possibly 'misprinting' and having it returned 'no such addressee'.

Try that. There's no way a Virus will find a Notepad Doc that has nothing to do with the email system, and then recognise the characters as 'email addresses'. Is there?   

You got in with the floppy bit just as I was planning to send this suggestion:

Why not back up the Notepad info on a floppy like I do.

That way it's handy and retrievable if you PC dies. 

Copying and pasting is certainly less trouble than punching the info in everytime. No room for errors either. 

Just a reminder to everyone, even though I've mentioned it earlier in the thread...

The Sobig virus is programmed to self-destruct on September 10th.

Hang in there guys...