minstrel: Re: Virus hoaxes and real viruses

[Corey Cole]

Of course, the fact that most of the warnings are hoaxes doesn't mean you
should let down your guard and start opening email attachments.  I've gotten
mailed about a dozen copies of the klez.h at mm virus so far.  All of them
"spoofed" the return address to make it look as though they came from
somewhere other than the actual sender.  That actual sender, in any case,
was usually someone whose machine had been infected rather than an actual
villain.  I also received 50 or so automatic notices of bounced and/or
infected emails that had purportedly come from me, but were in fact from
systems that had my email address in their address books.

Four of the attempted infections claimed to be virus protection software
that would clean up my machine from an earlier version of the same virus.
Moral:  Using Internet Properties, make sure you are showing file
extensions.  Don't ever open any attachment unless you *know* it is of an
innocuous type.  The fact that the sender is someone you trust totally is
irrelevant -- The more recent Trojans change the return address, so the
message might not actually be from the person whom you think sent it to you.

My rule on attachments:  I don't open them unless they're something I *know*
to be innocuous, such as .JPG or .txt.  And I show file extensions and
hidden and system files so they can't spoof me by sending a "file.txt.bat"
that looks like it's just a "file.txt" to an unsophisticated Windows user.
If there is any doubt, I phone the sender or send a separate email to verify
that I was supposed to get a file attachment, and what that attachment might
be.

Sorry for the length of this, but there's so much information going around
that I wanted to be as clear as possible.  Besides, I'm a programmer. ;-)

    - Erasmus von Spielburg (mka corey Cole)

> Please look up info on any virus warning you get in your email before you
> pass it on.  By far, the vast majority are hoaxes.