Today I got an email from my college account saying that an e-mail that “I” tried to send failed because there was a suspicious attached file. My outbox (Outlook express) doesn’t show me sending this file, and I’ve never heard of the recipient. Sounds bad to me, what should I do? I have an expired version of Norton that I let expire because the live updates always failed, but it probably isnt helping me much nowadays.
Your college e-mail system may be infected with a virus - forgot the name of it, but my firm was infected a couple weeks ago. It mimics the e-mail addys it finds on the system and when something is rejected or undeliverable, your account will get the notice. This can continue long after the virus is found and eliminated.
Most email viruses now spoof the sender. That is, it will open up the infected user’s email address book, pick one entry at random and select it for the “from” part of the email, and then select more users for the “to” part of the email. In other words, you probably didn’t send the email but rather someone else sent an email which looked like it was from you. Then again, it wouldn’t hurt to scan with an updated antivirus.
An anti-virus program couldn’t hurt either. This one is just as good, if not better, than Norton.
Yeah, this has caused a bit of controversy amongst geeks.
The Sobig virus (and others) does what xgxlx said: digs through an infected machine’s address book, picks one at random to be the “From” address, and sends an infected email to everybody else in the address book. The idea is, you’re not going to open an attatchment from somebody you don’t know, but you would if you got an email from Tom down the hall that said “Dude! Check out this screen saver!”
Antivirus companies know damn well that the “From” address can be spoofed, but they still insist on replying back and telling people that they’re infected, when they’re not, causing mass panic. Some antivirus software was actually sending back the viruse-infected file, at which point people were opening it to see what the hell they sent to their friend, and getting infected themselves.
As a slight update: viruses nowadays don’t just hit your address book; they search for e-mail addresses from anywhere on your hard drive. If your e-mail is on a web page, for instance, and if the infected person visited your web page and hasn’t cleared the cache, you can be lucky and be the “sender” of the virus.
The warnings are because a lot of antivirus software has the capability turned on by the recipient. It was a good idea three years ago, but it useless now. The problem isn’t the antivirus manufacturers; it’s the people running the antivirus and who still keep that option runnin.