Re: [gardeners] virus heads-up

George Shirley (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Thu, 21 Aug 2003 10:46:34 -0500 

Actually all those extensions look more like file extensions than 
address extensions, at least to me.

Margaret, you need to update your AV at least weekly, normally only 
takes a minute or less with your high speed connection, and is well 
worth the effort. I do it myself, every Friday at 0800, just to be sure 
it is done. Run the AV before updating, do scandisk, check all the 
files, and, so far, have never had a virus. Of course I run Zone Alarm 
as my firewall all the time, with MailWasher to catch the spam which is 
deleted, bounced, and blacklisted.

If your computer is always connected you absolutely must have a good 
firewall and good AV protection.

George

Margaret Lauterbach wrote:
> Thanks, Terry, but this is part of what is so confusing about computers 
> to me.  I've never encountered any e-mail addresses with those kinds of 
> extensions.  The only e-mail addresses I've seen have extensions of 
> .com, .net, or .country abbreviation.  Or does this worm hit e-mail 
> addresses of people who visit or open URLs with those extensions?  
> Frankly, I've been baffled because my carrier (DirecWay) sent me an 
> alarm, telling me to go to Microsoft, etc., and I went there and there's 
> nothing about worms or viruses or threatening clouds.  I tried to go to 
> home users part, but that was taking longer than I wanted to sit. I went 
> back to Microsoft later, and all I could see was that they were offering 
> upgrades of Messenger, something like Direct 9 or something like that, 
> music and video upgrades.  I'm not interested in any of that, so I got 
> out. I scanned my system, and Norton says it's clean.  I went back to 
> Norton and asked if there were any downloads I should have, and they 
> said 4, showed 3, and I downloaded those.  Everything is off, just a 
> little.  Grrr.  I think fall's coming early this year. What do you 
> think?  Margaret L
> 
>> Nope, it's a totally different one.  Here is a little of what Symantec 
>> says
>> about it:
>> W32.Sobig.F@mm is a mass-mailing, network-aware worm that sends itself to
>> all the email addresses it finds in the files that have the following
>> extensions:
>> .dbx
>> .eml
>> .hlp
>> .htm
>> .html
>> .mht
>> .wab
>> .txt....
>>
>> To read more about it you can go to:
>> http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sobig.f@mm.html 
>>
>>
>> It was upgrade to a class 3 threat and it can also steal secure 
>> information
>> including passwords.
>>
>> Terry
> 
> 
> 
> 
>