I’ve received this friggin worm seven times now. All from people I don’t know. They say it spreads through address books or cached web addresses. What exactly is a cached web address?
Were these people who inadvertantly sent me this worm former or present spammers? That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Is poetic justice finally happening to these bastards?
Can someone explain this worm a little more please?
I suppose it could be spammers, but probably not. There are various ways your e-mail could have been cached – a mailing list, a web page, whatever . The virus searches the hard drive for anything that looks like an e-mail address and sends itself out. If, for instance, you checked your profile settings here on the SDMB, your e-mail address would have been downloaded onto your hard drive for the virus to find.
When you surf the web, the pages are downloaded onto your hard drive (in Netscape, they’re in the cache folder; MSIE calls them Temporary Internet Files). This speeds up browsing (if you go to a page in the cache and it hasn’t changed, then it load from your hard drive). If that page had an e-mail address, the virus would find it in the cache.
You can (and should occasionally) clear your cache. In MSIE, click on “Tools” “Internet Options.” You’ll see “Temporary Internet Files.” Click on “Delete” to get rid of them (be patient – it takes time). You also should clear your history (just below) from time to time.