e-mail viruses

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
August 20, 2003

SW List, Daniel, Jerry...
The email-virus you describe below is exactly the kind of problem I had
for about a year...Then finally when I started to block some of the
unknown email addresses that were sending me the virus, I became lucky
and got rid of the problem. But then new viruses are written all the
time, so occasionally when it happens again, I have to go through the
same process again...And you have to be careful not to block a friend
of yours, who without knowing it, is sending you the virus...This is
not your fault, Daniel, and so your friends can only be forgiving,
since their email is doing the same thing to others, without knowing it
too...We are all in the same boat....

Fortunately, because you and I use a Macintosh, there are fewer viruses
written to hurt Macs, since most hackers want to hurt a larger group of
people, so they write most viruses for Windows...so generally Mac
people have less viruses...BUT the one area where everyone seems to get
viruses, no matter what operating system, is through email...so if you
use the Mail program on the Mac, you might train your JUNK mail to
catch any emails that you suspect hold the virus...then throw them away
without opening them...

In my case, all my email comes through a dedicated server on
DeafVision, so DeafVision has setup special blocking software for me
that really works, just as long as I keep adding the bad email
addresses...I once traced some of them...a lot of these email viruses
are coming from countries that are sad, angry, poor and hungry...I
guess it is their way of expressing their frustration...by making us
all frustrated...

Val ;-)


On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, at 07:50 AM, Daniel Noelpp wrote:

> That happened to me too: a computer virus is faking my e-mail address.
> It's a real shame. I don't understand what's happening exactly but I
> think it has been this way:
>
> 1. Some computer get infected.
> 2. The virus is looking for an unprotected outgoing e-mail server in
> the internet.
> 3. The virus is sending faked e-mails with all e-mail-adresses it can
> find on the infected computer.
>
> In the last few days I got more than 50 e-mails from people unknown to
> me (mostly from Switzerland) and all of them contain that virus. I am
> very worried. I think my e-mail-adress is being spread everywhere. I
> got warnings from e-mail relays which stopped e-mails faked with my
> e-mail address telling me that they didn't forward "my" e-mails.
>
> Daniel
>