Re: [gardeners] virus heads-up

Janni (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Thu, 21 Aug 2003 10:59:15 -0500 

No, George, the virus FINDS addresses in those files with those extensions. 
Those aren't the extensions that get attached to email. The most common 
ones that get attached are: pif, scr, exe, bin.

Janni

At 10:46 AM 8/21/03 -0500, you wrote:
>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
>>
>>
>