Wild worms!

[andysocial]

I've always been a bit smug about my lack of PC viral infections. I scoff when people make the assumption that, when their computer acts a little weird, it's a virus. I've been infected by one virus, and (until this week) only received three in the last 15 years that I've been online. Since I'm an online whore (shut up, you), that indicated to me that viruses are much less common than the tech news guys would like you to believe. Of course, I'm much more smug about the fact that I don't use Outlook Express, which seems to be a petri dish for VBS virii and other fun stuff.

This weekend, I received 4 different emails (all from strangers to me, but addressed to webmaster@andysocial.com), all containing some variant on the theme:

I send you this file in order to have your advice.

Of course, Norton Antivirus popped up and killed the worm contained in the attachments from these email messages.

The W32.Sircam.Worm has hit me! Oh, no! Fortunately, the fix for this worm is pretty simple: don't open strange attachments. And, if you must open them (curious monkey), go to Symantec's info site to find out how screwed you may be.

Ah, the joys of computing...

Comments

[shadwstalkr.livejournal.com]

I've always felt the same way for the same reasons. I rarely even run anti-virus software because I've never been infected (of course, saying this too much will probably solicit attacks against my systems). Outlook really isn't that bad, as long as you don't blindly open attachments without checking the extensions. Some people claim it auto-opens attachments, but I've never seen it do that, or even an option to do that.

Outlook

[andysocial]

Outlook will autorun attachments, if they're HTML-embedded, and if you have auto-preview on. Of course, there are security options to turn the auto-run of scripts off, etc. But many newbies don't know to even look for such things, much less that it's a good idea to turn them off and be wary.

Re: Outlook

[shadwstalkr.livejournal.com]

Well yeah, but the big worms so far have just been attachments. I worked at a company with a lot of stupid people last year, so I've gotten a lot of them.

Me 2

[(Anonymous)]

HA! Whoever this guy is sent me tons of the exact same ones... The only problem is, I almost beleived him, because I happen to be a hobby editor. I just love hotmail....
trunks_luver@hotmail.com
Kat