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Couple of wierd things in XP Pro lately

Markbnj

Markbnj

Elite Member <br>Moderator Emeritus
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Over the last 24 hours I have received five or six completely blank emails in Outlook 2003. No return address, no subject, no body. The header doesn't reveal much, except the line "Date added by Maillenium" is in one of them. Is this just bad spam?

Coincidentally I looked in event viewer and saw that several times over the last week I have a series of application errors with no info and event id = 0.

I know these things aren't related. I'm not paranoid. They're not out to get me.

Are they?
 
I've had the same thing. No subject, no text, nothing......just seemingly empty e-mails...............:scratch:
 
Forward me one? tmcfadden omnicast net. You have antivirus software, right? The Voices told me it was a good idea :Q
 
Sorry to say I deleted them. But if I receive any further blank emails from the astral travellers I will send you one.

Yes, I have Norton. Is there an antivirus program powerful enough to get rid of that?
 
What popped into my head was a semi-humorous writeup that F-Secure mentioned in their weblog: writeup about seemingly-blank emails If you scroll down about halfway you'll see what their point is. Rootkit city.

If this is what's happening, then

1) Is your system fully patched, including Office as well as Windows/IE/etc? The exploit in the writeup is seeking a vulnerability that was patched early this year.

2) do you run Outlook 2003 using an Administrator-class account? No = :thumbsup: because as usual, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same privileges as the user. MS05-001 > Vulnerability Details > Mitigating Factors. If you use a Limited account, your account (even fully 0wned) does not have the necessary privilege level to write to the C:\Windows\System32 directory.

3) is your Norton a current version (not 2001, 2002, 2003) and are all options enabled/maxed-out (heuristics, compressed-file scanning, etc) in all of the different configuration panels? IMHO Norton and all other antivirus vendors should enable all the goodies by default, and let the customer choose to turn them off, rather than shipping the product in Nerf Mode. But what do I know. 😛

Good luck 🙂 If you get more of thems, then start a blank email to me and drag-&-drop the whole mystery email off the Inbox stack and into the blank email as a .MSG attachment.

Yes, they're out to get you 🙂
 
I keep my system patched up and run Norton and various malware sweepers on all our systems. We are also behind a hardware firewall.

Not that any of this will keep them out.
 
Here is a follow-up on my speculation:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/11467.html

If you have the Bloodhound heuristics enabled on your real-time protection options, then exploits targeting that vulnerability should be detected as Bloodhound.Exploit.21. If you're patched against that vulnerability, then it should fail regardless. Anyway, it was just a speculation, the emails could be something completely different for all I know 😕
 
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