Email Viruses

[nightowl]

I have a question for you guys. I have Hotmail and I keep getting returned messages that say I am sending a virus. I did a Norton scan with updated definitions and my computer comes up clean. The Hotmail administrator says no one has been in my account. They said someone may have forged your e-mail address as the 'reply-to' or "from" field on
a piece of unsolicited e-mail.

Is there anything to do about this. Any suggestions?Thanks...........Jim

[ECA]

1. Did you send the Email, and you are getting a notice.
2. You didnt send the EMAIL, but are getting a notice.... ITS A SCAM, DONT touch it...

3. You sent the EMAIL, and it is being returned? By YOUR ISP(Hotmail??), or by THERE ISP??

When you run a virus can, Check ALL files. NO exclusions....

[nightowl]

Thanks ECA, Its number 2, I never sent an email, Maybe its a SCAM. I scanned all the files it comes up clean, thanks.........Jim

[ECA]

Yep, I get those...
Even with MSN, and MS return addresses.... DONT TOUCH THEM.

Report them to your ISP.... They are scanning the ISP for email locations and then probing to see what can pass thru the protection... They just did this to cableone, and Im getting 2 spams aday that pass thru.

[sinistar]

Yes this little email trap has been occuring often lately, often with a fake "Delivery Failure" type of notice. I got another one today to my yahoo account from an unrecognized hotmail account, with an obviously fabricated delivery failure status message, instructing me to "click on the following link" for the message content. I noticed beforehand that the email was about 41k, yet, there was less text than what I've already typed here. Since I like to play with fire, I went ahead and clicked to see what would happen, and seemingly nothing did. A new yahoo login screen popped up, and I was suspicious that it was a fake yahoo page, trying to capture my password perhaps. Then I tried to reply to the return address, and that's when things looked funny. The page flickered to a blank and suddenly and when I tried to back out, there it was -- IE had been hijacked to one of those lame search pages.

Adaware cleaned it up.

[ECA]

Standard warnings:

IF you dont KNOW WHO sent it, dont touch it, maybe a reply to, but nothing else.
ALWAYS read in TEXT MODE, never use HTML for mail. All persons on the net, send TXT and even HTML can be read but NOT displayed.
Always SEND in text mode. Then your friends KNOW who you are.
SEND a note BEFORE you send a file, telling friends what you are doing. Virus/trojans DONT do this. If there system has a virus in there email sending to all in there phone book, it WONT warn of attachments coming to them....Send a note BEFORE...
IF you recieve one without Notice, send a note to them and ASK if they sent it BEFORE you open it.

virus/trojan/and STUFF change all the time, DONT think you are protected, even IF you paid $1000 ayear.

[llbbl]

If you are using Outlook Express than make sure that you set it so that it reads all the messages in Text. If you are using Outlook than you can set it so that it does the autopreview but doesn't have the window where it opens the email like with Outlook Express. Run some sort of Spam protection and it will automatically get rid of the majority of the emails that look like they are valid. I use SpamNet made by cloudmark and it works spectacular. This in combination with a Virus program that automatically scans all incoming email will ensure that you are safe from spreading viruses that come in through your inbox. Of course there are other ways that people will spread virues and you have to be careful what you do as long as your connection to the net is live.