Re: a virus has taken my name, sorry

I have been receiving about 50 of these a day, and indeed, and I, too, have
tried changing passwords often, to no effect. There seems to be nothing to
do about it. My webhost sent this explanation:

Has nothing to do with your account or your password. It is called
spoofing and it is happening to me too. There is a big push by the
jerks that make these viruses. This is a new one that is supposed to
hit big time by Feb 1 and then stop Feb 12th. You can read about it at
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.novarg.a@mm.html
. I was just reading about it just now because I received so many.
Believe me they aren't coming from the server but it is making it to
look like it is. This virus was just discovered yesterday by the virus
companies. Nothing you can do but ride it out and don't download any of
those files.

and this link was informative, as it parses the headers so that you can see
where things are coming from:

http://real.fissure.org/articles/headers.shtml

I discovered that basically all of the virus spam on a given day came from
the same server even though it pretended to originate at all sorts of
addresses. Today's is 172.198.94.19; it always seems to be (or seems to
be) at aol, which, if true, is both not surprising and surprising, as they
should be on it, right? Having wasted several hours on this (rather than,
say, gum printing), the overwhelming impression I have is that the internet
is full of ways to scam and deceive, but that ultimately nobody can really
harm you without your complicity in opening a file, and we just have to be
careful not to do that.

Robert Schaller

On 1/30/04 3:51 PM, "Eric Nelson" <emanmb@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I've gotten these as well and on a G4 also but all it
> takes is someone faking your email address to send out
> spam/viruses and replies from the admins then come
> back to you.
> I worried about this at first, changed my password,
> etc, but now I don't sweat it as they can fake my
> address but not my IP...I think.
> Eric
> http://www.eman-photo.com/
>
>
> --- Judy Seigel <jseigel@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>> For the last several days I've been getting dozens
>> of indignant REFUSAL
>> notices from places and persons I never heard of
>> from the 4 corners of the
>> globe (if a globe can have corners) saying a virus
>> was sent by me and I
>> should get a virus detector, exterminator,
>> emulsifier, etc.
>>
>> For the record, I never do e-mail on my hard drive,
>> but only in the unix
>> shell of the service provider, which, being among
>> the big boys, I assume
>> has got virus protection up the wazoo. And although
>> my evil G-4 acts as if
>> it were a virus itself, I'm the only one who uses
>> it, only take downloads
>> I've been told to expect from a person I know & so
>> forth & so on.
>>
>> Which is to say, I'm sorry, but mea non culpa... tho
>> I do assume others
>> have been similarly abducted?
>>
>> J.
>
>
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Received on Sat Jan 31 09:27:03 2004