Me and others are getting mass email floods of phony Microsoft messages. Most claim to be a ‘Cumulative Security Patch’ which will “eliminate all known security vulnerabilities affecting MS Internet Explorer…” and have Microsoft-like graphics. (The English is a little awkward in these indicating non-English origin or a dumbass.)
The other messages are like this:
"Hi.
This is the qmail program
I’m sorry the message returned below could not be delivered to one or more destinations." and ect.
They all come with Attachments which are viruses or worms. Don’t open these Attachments! Microsoft is not trying to help you. (That should be apparent even without this incident…but I digress.)
Are other Dopers plagued with this today. How are you dealing with it?
If something is too good to be true, it probably is.
If you receive an email allegedly from a company such as Microsoft, go to the web site and confirm it for yourself. You will find Microsoft, as well as other companies, will have on their home page a link detailing the scam and what the company does and does not do, with respect to email mailings.
My email server automatically rejects any file with a Windows executable attachment, as a security measure, but I get an email telling me they did it. I’ve gotten 20 of these in the past three days, which is probably as much as I’ve gotten in the past year.
On one hand, I’m glad it’s not just me. I’d hate to think that one of my enemies signed me up for a free hourly spamvertisement.
What is causing this sudden flood of this worm? Symantec has upgraded it to a Cat 3 because of the extent of the outbreak - why now? Hasn’t this vulnerability in Outlook Express been around for a while?
Also - it seems that it spreads using the old Klez trick of mining the address book and sending itself out to the victim’s contacts. That being the case, why am I receiving this thing from people all over the world that I’ve never had any contact with? Are they spammers that just happen to have me in their address book?!
I use WebTV at home and we can’t get viruses but I tell you this Microsoft thing is nuts. I have SIX accounts and I can’t get to 5 of them. My emails on 5 accounts is clogged full of those phoney microsoft emails. It floods the cashe and I can’t use the browser.
So now I am back to using a computer. I mean this worm must be bad as I created three of these accounts within 2 weeks and they are already flooded. So while I don’t have the virus I have the effects of it.
20, 20, 20!
Oh, if only I had only gotten 20.
I got about 150 yesterday and about 10 every 30 minutes today.
I finally installed mailwasher just so I don’t have to download the things to delete them.
Blasted things!
Suezeekay: No. I have Explorer 6. It doesn’t matter what version you have. These are unwanted emails. I had 203 of them by this morning. There is nothing you can do but delete them, apparently.
Yesterday I checked and I got 124 emails over two days, 118 of them variations of fake MS security bulletins that tripped my virus program. I had to turn off automatic email scanning, because the virus software kept crashing and shutting the network connection down as the mail was delivering.
I’d normally get maybe 10 emails a day, 9 of them spam.
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Yea this is driving me nuts because my Yahoo mail account is always close to full and these damn attachments send it over the top before I can even delete them.
I get several hundred emails a day, about 1% of are of interest and maybe 10% are actually directed to me (including some from TSD telling me someone has replied to my posting although I asked not to be informed) and I am getting to the point of a really draconian solution of directing all mail from addresses not on an acceptance list directed to another folder I will monitor occasionally. Meantime all mail from ISP about a virus deleted will be discarded unread. As for the viruses themselves, they cannot hurt me since I read my mail on a Linux system.
I use Eudora and a private mail server on a private domain server and don’t get more than five to ten emails a week and all those from people I know and trust. So why don’t I get all this spam?
Oh and I do avoid most microsoft products like the plague where and when possible.
Mangetout, some email providers will filter out known virus attachments from spam.
I actually got this message today and was suprised how sophisticated and indiseous it was. An inexperienced computer user may not pick up on the clues that it’s a fake.