"Your computer is infected" ... or is it?

[leapingfrog0]

For the past several days I have been receiving emails from the Mail Delivery Subsystem telling me that some emails that I never sent couldn't be delivered to some email addresses I've never heard of! This has been happening to both of my email addresses (hotmail and an email address I have setup through my website's domain). Now today I received two emails back from two different companies telling me my computer is infected with the Klez virus. I downloaded the klez removal tool from symantec to be sure, and it scanned all my files and couldn't find a trace of the virus.

The same thing is happening with the other computer in the house too (different email address on that one). I ran a scan on that a few days ago and nothing was found. Now just a few minutes ago my grandma called me saying she's getting similar emails.

What's causing this?!

A further inspection of the email headers show this on several of the emails:

Message-ID: <MDAEMON-F200209181438.AA385895MD67028@realuse.com>
Message-Id: <20020910011736.RRCT19644.out008.verizon.net@Rxaknfec>

etc, etc ... so other people are sending these viruses to people as though it were through my email account? How'd they get this information (my email, people in my address book, etc)? How do I stop this? Can I? Someone explain this to me!

Thanks,
Andrew

 

[OZEE]

Klez spoofs addresses ... it's not really you that sent it, it was somebody that had you in either their address book, or perhaps you were on a common to: delivery list. Somebody that really knows what they're looking at can tell the real origin from the headers, but it's honestly quite a job to really track down the real culprit.

Make sure you keep your machine clean -- keep your virus files up to date! Then you're sure it isn't you that's causing it...

 

[leapingfrog0]

Hmm, interesting ... I never knew that before. Thanks.