Snopes Virus Error

[Ice_Wolf]

I’m not sure if this is the right forum – but for those of you on the Snopes mail list, they’ve made an error tonight.

This week has seen a return of the Sobig virus
(http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/sobig.htm), a
worm that forges e-mail addresses of folks known to
the intended victims to trick them into opening
booby-trapped attachments that contain the
contamination. This week’s incursion has been a bad
one - few inboxes have been spared, and any of us who
get any amount of incoming mail at all have been
whacking the stuff as if we were caught in a video
game - delete one message, and two more arrive.

Yet despite the ferocity of viruses like Sobig, the
snopes.com weekly update list should be invulnerable
to them because no one can post to the list except me,
Barbara Mikkelson. However, this evening I made the
mistake of forwarding one of those loaded e-mails to
the list instead of routing it back to where it needed
to go to kill it. The error was of the human kind, not
the mechanical kind, so you need not fear your weekly
update list has a great gaping security hole in it and
will periodically mail you viruses. Unfortunately,
that this was a personal “I hit the wrong button”
screw-up rather than a “Something snuck in here, and
no one knows how” situation still means a virus-loaded
e-mail went to everyone. For this I am heartily,
deeply sorry.

Therefore, if you have yet to do so, please DO NOT
OPEN a message from spoons@best.com titled “snopes:
security@microsoft.com post needs approval (fwd)”. If
you have, Trend Micro provides a system cleaner on
their web site which will remove Sobig.F - you’ll find
it at http://www.trendmicro.com/download/tsc.asp

Sorry about this, folks - I hit the wrong key.

Barbara Mikkelson
www.snopes.com

I’ve made th’ mistake of opening the email from Barbara Mikkelson that apparently had the virus load on it. This is to warn anyone else here who’s also on the list to watch out.

[ivylass]

I thought you were okay opening the e-mail. It’s when you click on the attachment that you’re toast.

[Ice_Wolf]

I thought so too. Hopefully, because I use Hotmail and it just looked like a series of scrambled text letters in the body of the email itself, I’m okay.