> How many of you have been receiving lots of spam in the past 72 hours > with the subject: "Details"; "My Details"; "Your Details"; "Thanks!", > "Thank You!"; "About your request"; "That movie"; and "Wicked > screensaver"? > etc.
If you want to know more about what's happening with all these virii, read up on them using Google or equivalent. Lately there's a rash of them running around. > Even more disturbing: in the last 48 hours I've rec'd 3 "returned mail" > notices from servers I don't know stating that they've rejected a > message "I sent" because it contained a suspicious .pif attachment. > These are messages to people I don't know, THAT I NEVER SENT, but I'm > listed as the sender. Obviously, someone mined my e-mail address from > somewhere on the internet (maybe off of a previous legitimate message on > somebody else's' box that I really did send?). You got these messages because people who you have send emails to in the past have gotten infected by these various virii (by clicking on the attachment, duh!!!) and now their infected computers are spewing out more virus-emails, but they are FORGING the FROM address so it looks like it came from you (and from everybody else in the infected person's computer's address book). The mail servers to which these emails were sent are correctly recognizing the virus and blocking it, but have NO WAY to know who REALLY sent the email, so YOU get the complaint even though you had nothing to do with it. PLUG: Linux is NOT susceptable to this crap. Why run an operating system that an teenage moron in Minnesota can cripple trivially? See: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112262,00.asp for the story of one virus writer who was caught. Not bright, is he? Bill Dudley SOHC #25
