Re: Try the patch that comes from Microsoft Corp.

I have now had a total of 74 of these patches etc with a malicious attachment in the past 5 days.

Could it have to do with my email address being on visible on newsgroups?

I am now posting with a rarely used address.

Greetings from sunny London, UK

chris

There are numerous network worms running around which scans mailboxes, newsgroup logs, and other files for ids of other victims to send themselves to. If you're AT ALL visible on the network with an un-munged ID, you are going to be spammed, and some of it is going to be viruses and worms.

Don't download/execute *ANYTHING* you didn't actually request. And even that may not be 100% safe.

Invest in a good antivirus (I'm running Norton). Seriously consider investing in a good firewall; Zone Labs has a decent freebie version and I'm sure there are others (I'm currently using ZL's commercial product.) And practice safe hex; remember that when you connect to another machine you are connecting to every machine it's connected to.

The Swen virus grabs addresses from the newsgroups at random. The more you post, the more you get hit. My logs show I have gotten 4399 copies of the swen virus.

Some things you can do... Use a fake address in your news setup, but within your domain. IE, if you use earthlink, use the name ccossel snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net. Make sure the mail address you are using is not being used by someone else.

Don't put your good address in the body of the message. If you do, use something like this in the bottom of the message : send mail to ccossel on earthlink (.net)

The viruses will start to subside when your messsages are no longer on the news server that the virus accesses. This may be weeks or months.

Good luck,

Daniel

My return adress is my ht mail box. It is filled (2 megs) at lest twice a day with virusses. I belive there is a definite connection.

Yes.

You know I don't think I've gotten any at all, if I have a few at most. My e-mail address was forged on a couple that went out though so I must be in someones address book who became infected.

Why don't you just change it to a remove nospam type of address?

Umm... duh...

Microsoft doesn't send files to patch systems like this...

I think someone out there is messing with the members of this newsgroup because only mere hours after I posted here for the first time I got three of these wonderful e-mails...

I always check the headers of e-mails from sources I do not expect to receive messages from...

Just becareful what you open on your computer... I tried to forward two of the messages to the server abuse addresses but the e-mails wouldn't send through...

Oh Well -- just ignore the flaming butt heads and maybe they will go away...

Evan

its a virus mail, where the offender may not even know they are infected.

Usually the sender does not know. The senders true address is also frequently replaced with one taken from their address book. At one point I had someone with my address in their address book who was infected and my addy was taken from there and forged on a bunch of mails and I got a mailbox full of gripes from systems/admins/users who didn't bother to check the headers to see where it really came from.