Mad spam virus maniac!

About a week ago I began receiving 5 or 10 spams per day at work from the same source. It rapidly escalated and now they’re sending me 60 or 70 per day, every one infected with a virus.

Question 1: What the hell is the sender trying to accomplish? The messages claim to involve Disney screen savers, Britney, KOF fighting games, love, sex and romance. But no one in his/her right mind would actually buy something from a sender of so many spams, right? Plus, they’ve all got a virus. So it must be just harassment for kicks and nothing else, right? I don’t think it’s personal, because another guy at work gets them too, unless it’s someone with a gripe against our company. Am I correct that the sender probably just gets a kick out of harassing people and trying to destroy their computers?

Question 2: What can one do about it? I’ve been sending the sender info to our company computer guy regularly to review (without opening the messages). He tells me it’s tricky because they’re using dynamic domains, changing their addresses, etc., and that ISPs generally won’t do anything about it. If that’s the case, do I have no choice but to simply delete 70 virus infected spams per day for the rest of my tenure at this job?

He’s not sending you viruses, the virus is sending itself. If you know where they are coming from, I suggest you slap him about and tell him to get a clue, and buy some anti-virus software.

We have Norton anti-virus so I dont think the viruses have caused any problem yet, but still…

Are you suggesting that upon infecting a computer a virus can initiate requests for spam to be sent to it regularly? That the spams don’t initiate outside my computer but instead from inside it due to a virus?

My co-worker suspects it’s the work of a former, disgruntled employee. Just a theory.

MT, try Mailwasher. It automatically bounces emails back to the sender as invalid addresses, and its free. It really cut down my spam.

That is possible.

No, they are initiated from outside but it’s also possible that your PC starts sending them to others, using your address book, if you don’t have proper virus protection.

What email SW do you use? Some have functions to block junk mail, based on the email address.

We use Outlook, don’t all businesses?

Thanks for the Mailwasher tip, Sandman, I’ll mention it to our computer guy (he asked me not to download any programs personally).

I’ve been reluctant to download programs like mailwasher because I’m not sure they’d work for me. Maybe you guys can tell me if they would?:

I download my emails from our company’s mailserver in Switzerland. Thus, if I install Mailwasher etc. on my local desktop here (I use Eudora), wouldn’t spam emails just bounce back to the company’s mailserver? Luckily, I don’t really get spammed too much, so I put up with because I know that our sysads in Switzerland are awfully busy and shouldn’t be bothered with blocking email addresses for me all the time.

Am I (as often enough) thinking way too complicated? Or is it true that I can’t use mailwasher while downloading my emails from a central mailserver?

Thanks for any (useful) comment
Iris

No, some are so clever to stay away from Microsoft. :wink:

MS Outlook has a junk mail filter, highlight the mail you don’t want and right click, then scroll down to add to the junk mail list.
Next time an email is send with the same originating address it will be filtered out.

Mozilla has a Junk mail filter too, when you tell it an email is spam, it adds the words in the email to a list of words that are usually in spam (eg: ‘Unsubscribe’) Then it doesn’t matter if the spammers change address or a few words in their spam. It never rejects valid email, apparently.

MT: Are you getting this from someone you know ?
if yes, tell them to get their machine fixed.
if no, put the address on ignore. Never ever respond to spam. you’ll only get more.

I don’t answer spam. I don’t even open it. And I don’t think it’s coming from someone I know. If I knew who it was from I would surely strangle him/her. 70 per day, all with viruses. . . I’ll block addresses as you stated, and am looking into mailwasher, but the problem is that the addresses keep changing (I can tell from the messages, though, that they come from the same harasser).

Depending on the virus, some look for contacts in the host computer and simply send emails to everyone on the list and attach themselves to the emails.

As for Norton, it’s not always 100% virus proof. It’s as secure as how updated the virus definition is on your computer. Always manually initiate virus definition update regularly (or simply set Norton to do it more frequently, like once a week or so).

Outlook is one of the most virus-friendly mail clients in the market today. Some hackers write viruses just for Outlook becuase of the way it handles emails (and in general, MS products are way too popular and common, thus making viruses spread that much faster). Not that Outlook is infested with security holes (or maybe it is?), but because so many businesses/people use it, it’s a lot more pron to be infected/spread. And being a big company (and some argue, evil) that it is, Microsoft gets a lot more media coverage everytime its products get bombed with a serious virus.

What does the spam say? Where is it from (from a friend or an unknown source)? What’s the name of the files attached? Give me these details and I can help you locate (and hopefully resolve) the problem.

MT, I use this site once in a while:
www.spamcop.net

What it does is that it analyses the entire email (with headers and all) and finds the source of the spam (servers that are responsible in sending/routing the spam) and sends a warning email to the hosts. I have used it for spams with a pattern. I have noticed my spam going down a bit after using it. Give it a shot.

If the virus is myparty, mylife, klez, nimda or anything of that sort, the person who is supposedly sending the emails probably doesn’t even know that they’re sending them. In all of these cases, the “From” field is most definitely not where it is actually from.

These virus all target MS Outlook vulnerabilities that allow them to infect a computer without you even opening the message. Especially if you and a co-worker are both receiving these emails, it’s entirely possible that the computer in question belongs to someone that both of you know.

The sudden huge increase can also be explained by multiple infected computers sending you the email. One infected computer will only send out 5-6 emails a day, but when they infect other computers, the number increases dramatically.

Ah…gotta love the social virus effect. This just shows that you’re very popular in people’s address books. The more viruses you receive, the more popular you are :smiley: