On Tuesday, November 09, 2004, at 11:36AM, John E. Malmberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:

>According to virus alerts that I have seen, that apparent spam was
>generated by a virus, and if you have a vulnerable platform, opening the
>link in it may infect your computer.

Thanks, John.  Hopefully the shrewd denizens of vmsperl are aware that my name 
is not Jane and I'm not from Miami, FL :-).  Unfortunately the only thing 
newsworthy here is that this made it through the Perl list software and got 
delivered to the list.  I'm sure they are tuning the spam filter accordingly 
and hopefully we won't see any more of these.  

The basic infection path as far as anyone can guess is that the viruses scan 
the hard drive of the infected machine for any HTML files and harvest any 
e-mail addresses they find.  If the infected machine has Perl installed, anyone 
whose address is in the Perl documentation gets put in both the sender and 
recipient fields of lots of virus-laden spam.  Joy.

>As the mailing list does not preserve the headers of the original sender,
>it is not possible to determine what network needs to be notified of the
>infected machine.

There is an address in the HTML of the message that could be a clue to the 
infected machine and/or the real culprit.

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