Could be just clueless. Wherever Sircam is grabbing the email address from probably has this user’s old address, mistyped address, or purposely bogus address. He may not even be an Earthlink customer, so Earthlink will not be of any help.
If you can, just set up an email filter to block him. Or does your email software automatically download all messages with their headers?
How does it change the text and attachment names? I got (before I blocked the address) 15 e-mails from the same stranger with attachments, but each one was different. I didn’t open any of the attachments, of course, but I opened a couple to get the address to paste into the filter list, and the texts were different too, claiming that I was being sent various things to edit.
Well all I know is I recieved the email, opened it, thought it suspect, asked about it here and then tried to deal with it.
I didn’t open the attachment.
I went to mcafee and tried their free scan. It said I had 5 files infected.
The last three,choke 32 worm, were easy to get rid of. I just deleated the files.
The other two,sircam @mm,were real bears.
This is my trial spin to see if everything works.
Mcafesaid it was gone.
So were a lot of files.
So you’re asking, how did you get infected if you didn’t open the file? I can think of a couple of possibilities. If you’re using an old version of Outlook, then it might have opened the attachment automatically, without asking you. If this is the case, upgrade to a later version (or better yet, a completely different program) yesterday, if not sooner. Another possibility is that this is the second time you received this virus, and the first time you got it, you weren’t quite as suspicious for whatever reason, and you (or someone else using your computer) opened the attachment then, and got infected.
For identification purposes: The filename, subject line, sender, and body of the message can take any form. Some versions of the message don’t have any body text at all, just the attachment. The dead giveaway is that the file has two extensions. If you have Windows Explorer set to hide file extensions, then Outlook (and perhaps a few other programs) will use that setting, and if a file is called, for instance, picture.jpg.exe, the “true” extension of .exe will be hidden, and the file will show up as “picture.jpg”. If you open it, though, it’ll open as a .exe, and run, infecting you. If you change your Explorer settings to view extensions, then you’ll see the full filename, and you’ll be able to recognize the virus instantly.
When I first scanned using mcafee there were 8000+ files.
The virus showed up in the last 600 or so that were scanned. The worm showed up first and then the 2 sircam files.
I noticed that the number of files increased as I repetedly tried to eliminate the virus. Mca scanned more files as I kept trying.
Now there are 3000 files.I hope the 5K were just junk. I haven’t found anything missing.YET.
Chronos wrote:
Among the many things I can’t figure out about why Microsoft did something they did, this is one of the ones that baffles me the most. Why does Windows hide file extensions by default? I can’t think of a single reason to do that, and it’s the default setting! Whenever I help someone get their new computer running, one of the first things I do is to change Explorer so that it displays extensions.
As near as I can figure, it’s cause some people are intimidated by that “scary computer stuff”. :rolleyes: