FLASH TRAFFIC - Virus variant running loose - UPDATED

g097103

Public Service Announcement

If you receive an email claiming "You have an ecard" it is a virus that will begin mailing itself it everyone in your address book when you click it. I am seeing it hammer some of my clients pretty bad.

UPDATE - It opens a link to a site called friendlygreetings.com. If you have a personal firewall put that or the address 65.89.168.4 in as a deny rule. The antivirus companies are working on a patch now and you should be able to download the ruleset sometime later this am hopefully. Current products won't catch this.


Scott M

rkfish

Thanks Scott......

will be looking for it!

dpoole

Thanks for the heads up. I've been getting LOTS of viruses lately. I've been keeping my antivirus software carefully up to date...

Rotts

Thanks that is usefull info.Rotts

izzy452

Thanks for the info.

Walt

gemseeker

According to the AV Labs, this one is not considered a true virus. It requires you to allow a program to install itself into your PC.

Friendly greetings.com

robertpr

You know, if less people used Microsoft products (like MSIE and Outlook), there would be less viruses running around. If you HAVE to use MS products, DO NOT use the default settings! Turn off the preview feature, and disable scripts in emails. You will immediately stop 99% of all viruses. DISABLE "ACTIVEX" as well! There are entire websites devoted to this kind of stuff.

Flash

In Outlook Express, how do you turn off the message preview option? I went to "Tools" then "Options" and I can't find how to change that setting.

coinguy1

MAtt, look under the "security" options.

Flash

Mark, I checked under "Security". I don't see choices in that window that seems to have anything to do with message preview.

coinguy1

Matt, PM sent.

ldhair

Flash
Try View and then Layout.

EVillageProwler

In general, I'd like to say that one should NEVER open any mail message with attachment if that message if from an unfamiliar sender.

In fact, I recommend that you not open even ordinary messages (those w/o attachments) from unfamiliar senders. Most of us read our email on systems that can easily handle HTML-formatted email messages. This is dangerous because you never know what's included in the HTML encoding.

I am generally pretty careful about my PC habits. But, for those of you who are particularly sensitive, I suggest that you disable the ability to read Rich-text or HTML messages via email. To most of us, plain-text messages work just fine.

If you absolutely have to read that rich-text or HTML message, then you can still do so by saving the message into a file and then using MS Word (for rich-text) or a browser (for HTML). Or, you can enable these features on an as-needed basis.

EVP

robertpr

EVP, Rich Text won't hurt you, and technically neither will HTML. Encoding within the HTML, such as activex and javascript, will. Activex and Javascript is executed within preview windows in outlook express.

ClarkOfKent

The main problem with the preview window in Outlook Express is the embedded signature. It can contain executable code. There's a fix for it available from Mickeysoft, but the best solution is to turn off the preview window or upgrade to full-blown Outlook.

Clark

robertpr

Alternately, you could just upgrade to Netscape.

g097103

Gemseeker, true it is not considered a virus because it requires you to allow the install. It would more properly be
considered a trojan. I refer to it as a virus as that is a term which will get peoples attention and they understand the
ramifications. Between all my clients we had about 50 machines knocked down and 1 company that went black when we
decided they needed to go off-net so as not to be sending this on to their customers. The comment of the day was "I
clicked it just like you said not to" , great commercial but too close to the truth.

Scott M