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New Virus Dresses Up as E-Mail
Reuters Page 1 of 1
09:49 AM Oct. 31, 2003 PT
A new e-mail virus capable of turning infected personal computers into "spamming" machines emerged on Friday targeting corporate and home users in Europe and the United States, a computer security expert said.
Anti-virus software makers Trend Micro reported that tens of thousands of its corporate computer users in France and Germany were hit on Friday afternoon by the virus, dubbed "Mimail.C."
By 11:30 a.m. ET on Friday, there were reports of infections in the United States too, said Raimund Genes, European president of Trend Micro.
The firm had a "medium risk" rating on the bug. "We may be upgrading it to high risk if it spreads in the U.S.," he added.
The virus carries the subject message line "our private photos ???." Opening the e-mail triggers the virus into action.
The virus installs an SMTP, or simple mail transfer protocol, program on an infected PC that turns the computer into a type of e-mail computer server capable of sending out torrents of virus-infected messages, Genes said.
The e-mail has spread quickly because it spoofs e-mail addresses, making it appear as if the e-mail comes from a friend or co-worker. "It's an old spammers trick," said Genes.
The virus is not believed to be particularly damaging to the infected computer, but it has the potential to unleash a flood of virus e-mails that could bog down corporate networks, Genes said.
I've devised a trick to help defeat both the spammers and the virus programs too. So far it is working pretty well. The first thing one needs to do to implement this strategy is to set up an email filter that will delete any emails from anyone who has an address card on file in your address book. I don't know about Internet Explorer but in the latest versions of Netscape you can do this.
The next step is to put an address card in your address book for each and every spammer that sends you an email. When they send the next one, the filter automatically deletes it. After a while, no more spam or at least much less of it.
And with the never ending supply of emails that contain virus in them or are virus themselves whose first trick is to peruse your address book and send out copies of itself to everybody in your address book, you hardly dare to put any of your friends, acquaintances or contacts in your address books anymore. So you might as well get some good out of it.
Of course, if you do get a virus then it will start spamming the spammers trying to infect them. Most of them have "blind" email addresses that bounce any incoming emails to them and that sets off the mailer daemon "unable to deliver" messages so you put the mailer daemons in your address book too.
Might as well get your revenge because somewhere in that mess of address cards will be the email address of the idiot who sent you the virus in the first place so maybe you can infect his computer too. (LOL)
If enough people will do this we ought to put an end to the spammers and the virus problem as well. After all, if they send out spam and it goes to a few virus infected computers they may just be in for some real fun. And if the sender of the virus starts getting back several thousands of his own emails in the form of the mailer daemons he will also have a real problem.
Those of us who have such a filter system installed would not experience much of a problem in terms of increased CPU usage but those who are the source of the problems would have suddenly generated themselves a real problem in terms of
CPU usage. Several thousand people using this trick just might do a better job of shutting down the spammers than the spam cops have ever been able to do.
Try it. You will like it. It can be a mess at first but in a day or two your file of address cards will grow to be big enough that your spam emails will drop to almost nothing.
