Recently, my Yahoo mail account has been flooded with ‘Delivery failure’ messages from all around the world, saying that the message I had sent could not be delivered because it was found to contain such and such a virus (Kaspersky and Worm.SomeFool.p being two of them). I have never downloaded attachments, have a firewall and recently got an antivirus program (Freedom, supplied by my Internet provider). I’ve scanned the system twice and found nothing.
Here’s part of the answer I got from Yahoo Support Group a short while ago.
Today, I opened my MSN account and found that a message had been sent from my account containing an ‘scr’ file. Now, I’m beginning to think that this is spreading…Needless to say that, in both the Yahoo and the MSN cases, I never sent such messages.
SIGH
Should I be worried? Have any of you experienced this and what have you done to solve the problem. In your explanations, please bear in mind that I am close to computer illiterate…so go easy!
P.S.: Would it help matters if I simply ditched my two existing e-mail addresses and replaced them with others?
What’s happening is that someone else is sending out a virus, and the virus is spoofing your email address. I find it unlikely that Yahoo or MSN would get infected by a virus.
It could be that someone had your email address in their address book on in their email program(probably Outlook) and the virus in their system is using the addresses in the book to fake the headers in the messages. Contact your friends who have you in their address books, and get them do virus scans. Otherwise, don’t worry about it.
Only problem is…I have 120 names in my address book (although I might be able to send the same message to all using two blocks of addressees), even though I e-mail only a few of them. The others, who have sent me e-mails in the past, have been automatically added to my address book.
It’s just that it’s a bit unnerving - not to mention frustrating - to think that I might unwittingly be infecting others.
If you are worried that you might be infected, try a free online virus scan to find out. I predict it will show you are not infected, for the reasons pointed out by others here, but at least you can have the peace of mind of knowing for sure.
Omni-not, you can be pretty sure that any virus you get did NOT come from the FROM address displayed. If you have scanned your computer with the latest pattern file for a anti-virus program, you aren’t the culprit here.
Your problem is aggravated by stupid email scanners installed on large companies’ servers, which are configured to bounce email that is determined to have something bad inside. Unfortunately, the FROM address is the one that it gets bounced to, since these programs have no more intelligence than warm apple pie and some administrators, not much more.
Columnist Jim Rapoza wrote a very good rant about this problem in the Feb 9 Eweek magazine. See this post for the link and more info. It’s an easy read.
Musicat: Thanks much for the article…I think I got MOST of it! And it re-assured me…
Fear: Thanks for the link. I had already been made aware of it on this message board. I did a third thorough scan… Result: Virus free! I am now at ease. And if the worse that comes from this is that my e-mail box gets cluttered, it’ll be a drag, but I can live with that.
Oops, let me clairfy what I said - the problem isn’t on your machine; you are probably completely fine if you virus scans come out okay. What I ment was that someone else is has an infected machine, and that machine is sending out viruses with your email address falsely placed in the “From:” column. The virus has probably gotten your email address by reading someone else’s address book(that your email address is in), and using that to fake the “From:” column.
There is nothing you can do besides talking to your friends who might have your email address in their address books, and having them do a virus scan. You didn’t infect them, but the infection they got from elsewhere will make you look bad.
That’s actually not that bad because my name doesn’t appear in the address (it’s a psuedonym in each case); it’s just that I felt bad infecting people I didn’t even know… But the situation is clearer for me now.
Viruses haven’t gotten the e-mail address from the address book in a long time now. They search the entire hard drive for anything that vaguely resembles and e-mail address and uses that (the programming isn’t all that hard: search for an @ and capture the text before and after it). For instance, if you have your e-mail address on your web page, and someone has visited your page, it will find your e-mail address from the visitor’s web cache.
Address books are only a small portion of the e-mail addresses being used. If you were infected, and you had all your addresses on Hotmail, it wouldn’t even read your address book, but it would have a field day on your hard drive.
OK. Doubts setting in again.
SIGH.
Two of my addresses are with hotmail, one is with Yahoo and one is with my IP. I haven’t got any problems with my IP address. I’ve been having quite a number with Yahoo these past few weeks, and one (my first, if I’m not mistaken) with e-mail yesterday. So, Chuck, what am I to conclude of that?
Sorry to confuse you. It’s extremely unlikely you’re infected. Any message bouncing to you about a virus, or because it was sent to someone you never sent anything to, is due to a virus being on another machine. The odds of your machine being the one infected is extremely small – there may be hundreds of e-mail addresses on any computer; if you were infected, the odds are that one other than your own is picked to spoof.
And it re-assured me…