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Re: virus

Subject: Re: virus
From: Walter Knapp <>
Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2003 16:33:18 -0400
Barb Beck wrote:
> Walt,
> 
> The message was strange because it came to me from you personally not from
> the list - but now that I look at the address it is not yours.  Wow we have
> to be even more careful.  There was a bogus excel spreadsheet attached that
> had the virus.  At least it was one that Norton can catch.  Going to have to
> go back to reading all my mail on the Unix system.  Things are getting
> uglier every day in Billy's World - School is out or almost out and looks
> like a lot of little punks have too much time on their hands.
> 
> Here is the header below (from Billy's World so everything backwards)
> 
> Would have replied to you personally but your brain dead service provider
> cannot tell a home office setup with a server from an open relay because
> they are using an outmoded list for determining those things.

As we have discussed, earthlink is just trying to "protect" us. 
Following the official rules. Most home servers have no problem emailing me.

Since I don't use Billy's World, it's all somewhere else. Spoofing email 
is extremely common now. As a mac person it amounts to extra spam email 
to delete, nothing more.

My guess is my post was sent to some subscriber of the list who is 
infected. The virus then attached a copy of itself, and mailed it out to 
every email address in that computer with a spoofed return address. 
Clearly that's likely to be a lot of members of the group.

I've been online during this and there is a scrolling activity monitor 
on my connection onscreen for me to watch. No unusual activity. This 
literally has nothing to do with me except I provided (via yahoo) the 
original post that was spoofed. The person involved may be offline now. 
Usually such viruses keep their computer busy sending as long as they 
are online. I knew exactly when the person in Washington DC was online 
last time as any email the virus sent to a bad address would bounce back 
to me. Luckily he would only be on a half hour at a time every few days. 
I'd get several dozen bounced messages each time.

I personally think windows machines should be banned from the internet 
until they clean up their act. And all internet servers need to virus 
check what's passing through them. That would solve the problem.

Walt




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