The e-mail address which I am using to post in this group has been steadily bombarded with viruses for the past 2 months and this trend does not appear to go down. Since I use almost exclusively this address to post here, I figure that the virus is harvesting addresses from this newsgroup.
This particular virus (or "mail worm") masquerades itself either:
- as a official looking Microsoft upgrade or
- as bounced mail or
- as a message describing a problem about storage systems.
It contains an attachement which does the following:
- search for e-mail addresses in outlook (hence will harvest addresses from newsgroups you read like this one)
- infects various critical files on your machine
- sends itself as mail to the addresses it found.
To me this virus is only a mild annoyance, since it will not execute on my computer, but I realise that if I receive 1 to 2 megabytes of virus messages a day, lots of people must be infected. Recent virus scanners will detect it and, in addition, outlook should be configured to not blindly execute mail attachments to avoid re-infections. Thank you in advance.