"WORMS"

BIGGEST ATTACK IN INTERNET HISTORY

Good Morning,

There are several new viruses and worms spreading across the Internet, in fact some are starting to call this "The Year of The Worm."

Don't Worry! Common sense and a little bit of education are the best ways to prevent yourself from getting viruses and giving worms to your friends.

DUMB WORMS

The old type of worms/viruses (dumb worms) were something you got by downloading an attachment to an email (or from a website). The virus/worms copied your address book and sent emails "from you" to people in your address book. You quickly found out you had the virus/worm because people wrote to you saying "Hey, you just emailed me a virus!"

SMART WORMS

The new type of worms/viruses (smart worms) are still something that you get by downloading an attachment to an email (or from a website). The virus/worms still copy your address books to send emails. However there is something different now. Instead of the virus/worm sending an email from you, it sends it from "one of the people in your address book" to "other people in your address book." In other words, the people in your address book are getting viruses/worms in the mail, but no one knows you are the one with the virus/worm because the worm was smart enough to hide itself.

Pretty smart for a dumb old worm, huh...

MAILER DAEMONS

      Many people have recently starting getting lots of mailer daemons. Mailer daemons are normally sent by ISP's when you try to write to an email address that is no longer valid. It usually has a message that says, "We tried to send your message but were unable to because this is not a valid email address." I get a lot of these when I send out the mail. People change email addresses, switch servers so this is normal.   However, today I had a mail box full of them and I had not sent any mail. Hmmmm...

      When I read the mailer daemons it said that I tried to send email, but the recipents account was not valid (closed). The mailer daemon said I had tried to send this mail at 7:01 am this morning (I was sleeping). The email addresses it listed were people I had never heard of.

      So in this case, I knew someone else had a "smart worm" and that it was trying to write to people in their email address book, and it was pretending to be me (The emails "appeared" to be from baddteddy@aol.com).

       No big deal. One person with a worm. If everyone uses an antivirus program and doesn't open the attachments, no problem. No one will catch the virus and the worm will not spread.

THE WORMS ARE COMING

Except... I heard from a dozen people today who had also been getting mailer daemons for emails they had not sent. That meant the problem was a little more wide spread. Next I checked several online anti-virus websites and found that all of them were saying that they had encountered big problems with new worms (four new worms this week). And some were saying this could become the biggest infestation of worms so far in Internet history.

MAILER DAEMONS ON AOL

There is some good news in the war on worms. Some of the major ISP's have set up virus scanning software on file attachments. If the ISP detects a virus, it deletes the outgoing email and sends a message to the sender (or who it wrongly assumed was the sender) of the email that their email was not sent because it contained a virus. On AOL, if someone has a smart worm on their computer, the worms copies the address book and sends itself to everyone in the address book. All email attachments on AOL are checked for the worm, and since these emails contain the worm AOL deletes the outgoing email. Instead AOL sends a MAILER DAEMON to the person listed (by the virus) as the sender of the email saying (Somewhere in all that text) "554 TRANSACTION FAILED - Unrepairable Virus Detected. Your mail has not been sent." If you receive a message like this it does not mean you have the virus. It means that you 'or' more likely someone you know has the virus and the virus is spoofing your address as the sender when it is sending out email viruses to other people in their address book. AOL is doing a great job of stopping the spread of the virus by email, but unfortunately most of the time they are creating a new problem sending MAILER DAEMONS to innocent victims rather than to the person who actually has the virus. (Don't you just love AOL, lol)

If you are getting this type of message please forward this tutorial on worms to everyone you know and ask them to run their virus programs.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

1.   Read the VIRUS TUTORIAL

2.   Update and run your anti-virus program (they will find and remove the worms)

3.   Don't download an attached file without first checking back with the sender (remember, viruses can come from your friends email address too)

NEED A FREE ANTI-VIRUS PROGRAM?

Grisoft AntiVirus - Free Trial

This program is great. Easy to install. Easy to operate. Finds and removes viruses and worms quickly and easily.

WORMS ATTACHED TO EMAILS
(File Types)

The most current email worms have attachments ending in;

1.   .scr
2.   .pif
3.   .zip (This one generally is a file called "Message.zip")

WORMS ATTACHED TO EMAILS
(The Subject Lines)

The most current email worms have subject lines such as

1     Mailer Daemon (There is a file called Message.zip attached to this one)
2     Thank You
3     Your Details
4     Re: Approved
5     Re: That Movie
6     Re: Thank You!
7     Re: Your Application
8   "Please see attached file for details.''

WHERE DO VIRUSES COME FROM?

Where do viruses come from in the first place? Are they magical? No! Do Artificially Intelligent Computer Life Forms create them? No! Do they just pop into being from no where? No! Viruses are small computer programs created by people, who for whatever reason enjoy creating havoc for the rest of us.

Creating a virus is easy. Any malicious computer geek can do it. It's getting the virus to people like you and me that is their problem.

HOW DOES THE CREATOR OF A VIRUS SEND IT OUT TO PEOPLE?

Creating and sending out a virus is a federal crime. The creators of worms and viruses know this. They want to feel clever, not go to jail. So after they create a virus they have to find a way to send it out so that no one (the FBI, police, etc.) can trace the virus back to them. They know that tracing an email back to its source is pretty easy. They know better than to send the virus/worm out to people who know them. So instead they have to send the virus out to a large number of strangers in a very short time. The question is, how do you send a virus out to a large number of strangers in a very short time?

SPAM

Common sense dictates that spam is the starting point for most viruses. It's the simplest way for the virus's creator to send it out to the largest number of strangers in the shortest amount of time.

HOW DOES THE VIRUS CREATOR SEND SPAM

In order to 'spam' the virus to a large number of people there are two major options open to the virus's creator. The first is to collect email addresses from un-bcc'd mail, from websites, from your profiles, etc., (they can even buy lists of millions of email addresses from other spammers), and then create an address book to send the virus from (spam mail with the virus attached). The second is much simpler. It's to infect the computers of people/companies that send out spam. Think about it, if the creator of a virus can infect just a few computers belonging to people who send out spam, they can get these computers to then send copies of the virus to millions of people.

HOW DO WE AVOID SPAM VIRUSES

If spam is the most likely place for a new virus to come from (Viruses so new that your anti-virus software might not stop it) then the simplest way to avoid catching and spreading these spammed viruses is to "NEVER OPEN SPAM MAIL" and also "NEVER CLICK ON LINKS TO WEBSITES IN SPAM" (Spammers websites can be the source of the virus). If you never read spam mail then you are greatly reducing your chances of the creator of a virus from sending a virus directly to you. :-)

SPAMMERS ARE THE LARGEST SENDERS OF VIRUSES

Not only are spammers the first to catch a virus/worm and start spreading it around, but they are also the largest senders of viruses on the Internet. Remember, worms and viruses work by stealing email addresses from your address book and then sending mail (containing a virus) to those email addresses. The bigger the email address book, the more email addresses that the virus can send it too. So who has the biggest email address books on the Internet? Spammers of course, because they send mail to millions of people. If you catch a virus, your computer might forward it to a few people, perhaps hundreds, but if a spammer catches a virus, then their computers can forward it to millions of people.

HOW DO YOU STAY OFF THE SPAMMERS MAILING LIST

The best way to avoid spam, is to make yourself invisible to spammers. If they don't know you exist, they can't send you email. There are many ways to make yourself invisible to spammers, too many to list here, but... You can find out "HOW TO BECOME INVISIBLE TO SPAMMERS"

CONCLUSION

Yes, the worms are coming. They are going to fill our mail boxes with phony emails with viruses attached and mailer daemons, but you have nothing to worry about "if" you simply delete (I love the DELETE key) these emails and run an antivirus program.

For more information on spam, viruses and how to use your computer please visit www.baddteddy.com

Great Bigg Teddy bear Huggs... BaddTeddy

RELATED SUBJECTS

TUTORIAL INDEX

VIRUSES

SPAM

RUMORS

MAIN INDEX

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