Re: [CH] Received Chile list attachment FARTER.EXE
Michael Bowers (bowers@elsie.ucdavis.edu)
Tue, 21 Dec 1999 10:01:44 PST
>
>I received casper.exe attached to an email from the chile heads list, not a
>list member, but from the list address. It was the email mentioned by Mark
>with the animations etc. Weird part was the subject line was a thread that
>I had responed to at least two months ago ('hot coffee'). Being the
>paranoid pseudo geek that I am I simply deleted it.
No, this didn't go out via the list. As others have mentioned, this
"worm" picks up messages in your "in-box" or other unread mail and sends itself
to the original sender. As all Chile-Heads messages have "Owner-Chile-Heads"
as the "Reply-To" header, it likely gets put on as the sender. Normal list
mail has the original sender as the sender; the Reply-To header is to prevent
bounced mail from being resent to the list in an endless loop.
The filters I am using to keep the list "ASCII" (ie, plain text) have
been effective in stopping all attachments since early summer. There is still
spam being posted, there are still virus's being inadvertantly attached to
email and there are still people posting in HTML; however these are not being
forwarded on to the list. Your luck list owner gets to deal with them :-)
This recent virus seems to have only affected people who have posted recently
(ie, your message is still in the recipents in-box).
As has been mentioned, never open a program sent to you unless you are
certain that it's what you're expecting. The various anti-virus sites have
information on how to rid your computer of these programs. I see them, but
don't read or deal with the list mail from a Windows computer just for these
reasons.
Have a happy, hot holiday season...
Mike
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Michael Bowers mkbowers@ucdavis.edu
University of California, Davis Owner: Chile-Heads mailing list
Chile Heads Home Page: http://neptune.netimages.com/~chile/