New Worm Poses As Security Patch

Chuck,

It's nice of you to warn us about this.

Also, NEVER, EVER run a program, screen saver, greeting card, slideshows, patch, fix, patch, update, upgrade received over e-mail or in popups. Even if it comes from a friend, no matter how close he or she is. In this particular case, contact the friend first thing after receiving this e-mail and make sure he or she sent it deliberately. Many, many times, viruses will spread themselves using an infected computer's address book. So in many case, the message seems legitimate but in fact, it contains a virus.

If it's too good to be true, it probably is. If a major company sends you an update over e-mail, it probably isn't safe. 99% of the times, company will have a website from which you can download patches. They won't go into the trouble of sending the patch to their users. They will, most likely, invite them to download it from their website. But again, I make it a policy to visit the websites myself, even if I receive an invitation that links to their website. Here's an example :

ICQ hoax is a common one : you receive an e-mail that asks you to give them your username / password or else it will be deactivated. It comes will a full HTML page, containing real links to ICQ website. In fact, the sender wants you to give your coordinates, for it can use it. If you don't pay attention, you're likely to end up giving your private information. But, when I opened the HTML code of the e-mail, I discovered the problem (the reply server doesn't math ICQ's).

Be carefull people, and get yourself an anti-virus :)

Ray

I just got barraged with two more from different addresses, plus two different viruses from other sources. Fortunately, NAV took care of the last two, right after it had run its normal weekly update of definitions. Hope it wasn't too late, though....if you don't see me for a while it'll be because one of them got through...

:-(

Chuck

Yes i got the messages and deleted them and Norton downloaded a quicky update just afterwards so i suspect they were one step ahead of Norton. I'm going to go do a scan. Later people. Chuck, thanks for the verification !

Same here in Europe,

I received 4 e-mails all about this alledged patch.
Meanwhile macafee was upgrading in the back.
I deleted them straight away.

Robert

I've got the "record breaking" 11 messages within 24 hours. Tonight, I slept about 6 hours and in the meantime 24 spam mails came in.
I'm glad I cannot lay my hands on these guys.

Leen

Is it me or is the number of spam e-mails have just doubled in the last 24 hours? While on
vacation, I received 68 junk e-mails at my Hotmail account and 214 in my regular e-mail account.
Now, I was gone five days, so it makes an average of 56 e-mails per day. Now, just yesterday, I
deleted over a 100 e-mails.

Ray

"Leen Koper" <leenkoper@zeelandnet.nl> wrote in message news:<2ccd79df.5@webx.la2eafNXanI>...

> I've got the "record breaking" 11 messages within 24 hours. Tonight, I slept about 6 hours and in the meantime 24 spam mails came in.
> I'm glad I cannot lay my hands on these guys.
>
> Leen

I have received 8 of these messages so far this morning.
Ken

I got 7 Microsoft e-mails

overnight and 4 more as I read this thread. Any recommendations for a good anti-virus service thats compatible with Elements.

Steve