Not only am I getting more spam than ever, it seems as if it is a new type of spam and/or virus. Quite often the message states:
“The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment.” OR
“The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment.” OR
“test”
Also, I get a lot of “returned” E-Mails for messages I never sent to people I don’t even know.
Is this the latest development in the spam or hacker community?
It’s the mydoom worm most likely. It’s not a virus.
I’d have guessed it as the w32.novarg.a
Which IS the mydoom worm. (Sorry about that Reeder)
Should you get infected, the removal tool is at the link I posted.
Since nobody answered the second part of your question, I’ll do it.
The returned-mail messages you’re getting are from messages sent by an infected machine. Most of these email worms grab addresses from any local address book and use them as fake return addresses on the messages they send. That spreads out the dead-address bounces so the owner of the infected machine doesn’t notice and clean up.
Somebody with your name in an address book is infected.
And, as usual, the headers have been forged, so the mail is not coming from the address on it. I’ve gotten bounce messages for mail supposedly coming from me. Since I’m on Solaris at work, I don’t have to worry about virii.
From what I’ve read the virus also propagates through Kazaa, so you might want to make sure that’s disabled. All the anti-virus software packages have been updated, so if your signatures are up to date you should be fine.
This isn’t even a very clever one. You’d think by now people would be smart enough not to open random attachments.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? My boss decided to open an exe file we got here at work. The email was from some russian woman or other saying that “the pictures we were talking about are ready” etc. Of course he had no idea who this woman was but that didn’t stop him from running the .exe… The virus infected 7 computers and it took me 72 hours to clean them all. My boss is 24 like me but actually has proper education; I almost couldn’t believe it when I saw what he did.
Erm… anyway… what rjk said. If your computer is infected you should notice that your internet connection gets much slower, that’s the virus sending out emails - at least IME.
So, when my job is to take questions from random users, and my boss writes me an email saying “Check this out”, Im supposed to ignore it? Attachments only seem random based on who they’re from and the info you know about it before potentially opening it. It’s all context.
You send an e-mail back to your boss asking if he actually sent it. If he gives you grief, explain that his address could have been spoofed and you’re trying to save the time and money it takes to clean a virus. Explain to him that next time he should put something specific about the file instead of a “check this out,” which is a common message on infected files.
And I can’t imagine why a random user would need to send you an attachment to ask you a question.
Thanks Reeder, Daizy and RJK
Luckily, I was not infected.
Why would someone open an attachment from people they don’t know? Well, if you have a website (as I do) you get E-Mails from total strangers and occasionally these E-mails have attachments (usually *.txt or .jpg)
Of course I don’t just randonly open anything with an attachement especially when it has a “message” of
^%^%&(((((hjhdsgdhsfiiif%%%##%#%@@SSSDEhkjhuitu
Yeah that’s usually quite a tipoff.
Anyway, thanks to all that responded.