I-Worm.BadtransII

[murat]

yeah - the mails were a worm

http://www.avp.ch/avpve/worms/email/badtrans2.stm

[Jan]

Yes, this is a VERY nasty version.

Send the link to all your friends and remind them to update their DAT files ASAP.

Also remind them to NEVER open attachments from strangers as is the case with this one.

[meow]

Sorry - what DAT files are you referring to?

[Jan]

meow, if you have an antivirus program, they update their DAT files every now and again to protect you against the newer viruses.

It is a good practice to go to the site of your AV programs to get the latest. (I do it weekly)

I use macafee so their latest are listed here

[meow]

Sorry, I stupidly assumed you were talking about Windows files.
I often update my sig files a couple of times a day. I don't have to go anywhere. Just push the button and if there is anything new it downloads. Very handy.

[Jan]

That's okay, but for some of the young dudes out there who are lurking, or members who think they won't get a virus, it is an important issue.

I have had so many of these pesky emails already!

If you see an email from a stranger with subject re:, file size 40k, just delete it without taking the time to open it.

Let's all band together and help put a stop to it

[Cyber]

Seriously, I ALMOST got it, i had to use norton to quarentine it.

[trenzterra]

uh oh.... maybe LeX's txt file is a virus!

[murat]

yes its the same

[trenzterra]

good luck to LeX now.

[polygon]

SirCam and BadTrans and Magistr and others all scan the browser cache of an infected machine in search of email addresses to send to.

In other words, if you have your email address on a popular web page, you have to cope with a constant stream of virus emails.

Me, I've gotten some 300 just in the last few weeks.

I guess it's a cost of having a web site from now on, along with all the spam.

[trenzterra]

Originally posted by polygon
SirCam and BadTrans and Magistr and others all scan the browser cache of an infected machine in search of email addresses to send to.

In other words, if you have your email address on a popular web page, you have to cope with a constant stream of virus emails.

Me, I've gotten some 300 just in the last few weeks.

I guess it's a cost of having a web site from now on, along with all the spam.

wow! 300! show us your experience with viruses...

[polygon]

My experience? I receive them and file them under "virus". I guess I have a pretty large collection, heh.

If I have any doubt about whether something's a virus, I forward the email to my university account; the virus screen there catches it (and gives the virus name) if it's a recognized infection.

The SirCam virus/worm sent me a lot of private documents, copied off hard drives, but I have not read them.

I should say that I read mail in Pine on a Unix box, so I'm not subject to these (mostly) MS-Outlook transmitted diseases.

As to the flood of BadTrans mail, I have decided to be somewhat responsible and send a boilerplate reply to each one alerting the user to the infection and pointing to Symantec's page on this virus: http://securityresponse.symantec.com...rans.b@mm.html

Note that the virus inserts a leading underscore in the email address, so to reply, you have to remove the underscore. (I suspect the virus author did this so that users wouldn't be alerted to the infection by bounced emails.)

In October 2001, my site got a bit over 1.5 million hits (about a million page views), so there are a lot of systems out there with stuff from my site sitting in browser caches for viruses to find. I guess it would be worse yet if I hadn't taken my email address out of the page footer (it used to be on EVERY page).