Virus question

[JoeyM]

For the past few weeks I have been receiving frequent emails with viruses attached (blocked by Norton). I rarely received these in the past. Today I received this email (which may have also had a virus attached):


Dear user of e-mail server "Charter.net",

Some of our clients complained about the spam (negative e-mail content)
outgoing from your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by
a proxy-relay trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe,
follow the instructions.

For more information see the attached file.

Yours,
The Charter.net team

Has my computer been infected?
Am I on some list somewhere that will now receive virus attachments everyday?
Are other people getting email from my computer that has a virus attached?
What should I do? I have run Norton antivirus already.

Thanks,

Joe M.

 

[jadinolf]

Chances are that the virus is coming from someone who has your email address in their address book.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Many viruses/worms these days access people's email address books and then send a copy of the worm to people in the list. You aren't on a particular "list" due to receive bad emails every day, you just happen to be a contact listed with someone who is infected. It is VERY unlikely that the tech support people at charter sent you an attachment to explain how to remove a virus. I assume you are at least a charter user. It sounds like a worm that simply looks at your domain in your email address and pretends to be an email from the administrators of that domain. You are probably not infected, but the worm tries to get you infected by opening the attachment.

Make sure that Norton is up to date, of course. You might also try Mcafee or Trend Micro's online virus scanners (I think Mcafee still has one) just to get a second or third verification that you're clean.

It may be possible to figure out at least what ISP the email came from by looking at the headers. You might also send a copy of it to charter's email administrators, to verify that it did not come from them, or to at least make sure they're aware that some of their customers may be getting hoodwinked by that.

There's not much you can do to stop such fake emails, only block them out with antivirus software. On the rare occasion you can track down the source, you can let the originator know that they're infected.

 

[JoeyM]

Thanks for your help. Norton's been good so far and I'll do as recommended.

Joe M.