VERY IMPORTANT - VIRUS ALERT

[RollerBall]

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

[Craig.]

yep already dealing with this one. total now upto 100 recieved.

[Paz]

 I've got about 15 of them now.

[ozzy72]

I've got none! Nobody loves me

[Professor Brensec]

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 ****.  

[RollerBall]

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

Chance is these were virus-containing. There would be no need to attach anything to a genuine email confirming approval for something you had genuinely applied for

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?

They can't infect your form because the contents of that will be generated by your software using something like Sendmail or Blat. Also, as they don't know what the output of your form looks like, they can't easily create a copy. But in any case, you know that your form doesn't have an attachment, so you'd be alerted anyway. So don't worry too much!

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?

The so-called Love Bug perpetrator was located at enormous effort in the Phillipines I think. He was a computer student and did receive a prison term I'm glad to say.

In view of the cost of his little effort to the World commercial and IT system I think he should have got 30 years as a deterrent to others, frankly, but it was a lot less than that.

PS

Just noticed the pic. If you need further info, send Teryl over for an in-depth one-2-one discussion about viruses, the Internet and the World Wide Web

[deadnight]

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.

[Romulus111VADT]

I got hit with 23 to date. They should take these A$$holes out and shoot them live via the internet. Start off with the legs and work your way around...make them suffer for all the misery they've caused and the fact you need a full 2 gigs of darn hard drive just to hold the programs to protect your system from their warped sense of reality.

[Craig.]

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

[Scottler]

I logged in this morning to find 115 emails, all seeming to be from FS related sites.  Some of the bigger ones were:

FSInflight.com
FSNavigator
Simflight

There may or may not have been a Simviation, I didn't keep them long enough to make a mental list.  lol

Many said "You're Approved", some others said "Your details" or "My Details".

Seems odd that they'd all be FS related...

[Biggles]

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

[Mr. Bones]

thanks for letting us know...but i haven't had any of them...lucky me!  ;)

[Professor Brensec]

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?  ;D

[Craig.]

opening the email shouldnt do any harm but its best just to delete them to avoid any slight possibility of infection. the firewall cant stop this kind of thing if you open the attachment i believe.
whats really starting to annoy me is the fact i could be missing important emails because these things are filling up my inbox and bouncing back any legit emails to the sender due to a full inbox.
i seriously hope they catch the person who did this and hang him from a high beam by his testicles using fishing wire

[Scottler]

Apparently the problem goes beyond the FS world...

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