Viruses Going Around Today

Small Business Tech Notes

Just a quick note to let you know that there are two strange emails going around today and everyone is getting a whole bunch of them in their mailboxes.

The first one is a virus called the sober.worm. This email can have a variety of subject lines but the most common one seems to be Mailing Error and the email has a .zip file attached. This is a virus, do not open it. If you have opened it please let us know immediately so we can contain the infection.

The second email going around is a list of failed message deliveries for email which you did not send. If you are getting these, then the good news is that you aren't infected with the virus. You can safely delete and ignore these emails. The bad news is, that someone you know is infected.

Here's how these viruses work: If you are infected with the virus it picks an email address out of your addressbook and uses it as the return email address for it's evil deeds. So when the virus sends out email that can't be delivered, it never returns to the person who sent them rather it returns to a random someone else. This helps them conceal the true source of the infection.

As always, please keep a eye out for suspicious email and don't open it. If you receive an attachment the email text should very specifically reference the attachment, as in "attached you will find the scanned receipt for the purchase made on May 2nd, that we talked about yesterday". Any email that says anything about password, your email account, mail failure, or simply see attachment, should be viewed as suspect and a call to the sender is in order to make sure that they intended to send you something before you open it. This may take an extra minute or two but it will save you hours of frustrating computer problems and possible data loss.

Be safe,

Amy