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johanson / Moderator

Aug 22, 2003, 1:34 PM

Post #1 of 3 (909 views)

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Another Virus

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If you get an email message that says this

Dear friend , use this Internet Explorer patch now!
There are dangerous virus in the Internet now!
More than 500.000 already infected!

Don't open it or use the internet patch. Enclosed therein is a repair to one of the dangerous viruses but ALSO INCLUDED is another virus.

I got the above email at 2:30 PM your time Friday. My Norton caught said virus and blocked it. I haven't received this many viruses in such a short period of time in quite some time.

Thank you Microsoft and Norton for protecting me from these attacks. Unfortunately not everyone was protected, so the added volume created by these viruses have taken a toll on your Internet Service Providers (ISP). I know lagunanet had problems yesterday in Ajijic and up here in the state of WA my ISP has delayed delivering some emails for more than 12 hours. Others never arrived. How do I know? I sent myself test email messages from yahoo, lagunanet, hotmail etc. I cc:d copies of each to other ISPs where I have accounts.

All of the cc's went through but not all of the originals reached me via my WA ISP.

My point? Even if you are protected from infection, there are enough who aren't that the internet email volume has increased dramatically and that all of us will be negatively impacted.

DON'T blame the ISPs or their staff for these problems, as some have in Ajijic, rather know that everyone is working hard to protect you from those hooligans who created these viruses.

I happen to know that the lagunanet web hefe and a couple of technicians worked until late last night at their ISP fighting the spam issue and the latest virus attacks. So if your email service hasn't been perfect, don't complain as a few have done, rather why not thank those who have been working so hard to try to protect us.

johanson / Moderator

Aug 22, 2003, 10:57 PM

Post #2 of 3 (891 views)

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Re: [johanson] Another Virus

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I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but never have I received more than an occasional infected email. For a while this evening I was inundated by spam email about 80% of which were carrying viruses. I must have gotten 15 infected in a period of 20 minutes. I've never received that many in a week, let alone in 20 minutes.

So look out, follow all of the suggestions made by Esperanza and the others on earlier posts about worms and viruses. So far I haven't been infected, knock on wood.

Pete

Kip

Aug 23, 2003, 6:26 AM

Post #3 of 3 (885 views)

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Re: [johanson] Another Virus

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Part of my job is protecting a major health care corporation from hackers/virus developers. In the last 60 days, the number of virus infections has increased by over 1100 percent (thats more than 11 times from 2 months ago). All of these virus start off with a information pay load (pay load is what the virus does to your system). The current news maker SOBIG, came on the scene 3 weeks ago, at that time it collected information on what systems it could get into, and email addresses that were on that system. The developers of this virus (and these are some very smart, computer knowledgeable people) then restarted the virus with several different types of pay loads (some of these will completely wipe your hard disk after using your system to infect other systems). Microsoft has in the last year stepped up to the plate and did some thing about their very popular operating systems lack of security. Anti virus developers have also increased their speed in detecting these strains and getting answers to their users. But, like I tell all of my people and users, it is up to you to make sure that your system is protected. This means that you download and install all of the OS patches from Microsoft (or if your running XP Home, or XP Pro, that you have auto update turned on and that you use it). Some form of anti virus protection must be installed on your system. But, you also need to have some personal firewall protection installed as well. The best and easiest to install (and it is free) comes from ZoneAlarm. On all of my machines here at the ranch, and the laptops that I take with me, I have anti virus and firewall protection. As of this writing, in the last 7 days, 2600 infected emails and attempts to connect to my systems have been blocked by the anti virus software and the firewalls. You should have a firewall even if all you have for a internet connection is dial up.

Hal Weiss

Securitry Consultant
kip