Watch out for this virus e-mail

  • This is off-topic, but we’re obvi­ously all computer-savvy peo­ple, so I thought it was worth doing my lit­tle bit to get the word out.

    spam-mail_sm.jpgThere’s a nasty, nasty virus e-mail going around right now. This isn’t one of those silly phish­ing let­ters with half the words mis­spelled that screams out ‘fake!’ This is an entirely believable-looking e-mail that pur­ports to come from MSNBC’s “Break­ing News” e-newsletter (which does really exist, by the way), and appar­ently, the same e-mails are going out sup­pos­edly from ‘CNN E-mail Alerts.’ I’ve started get­ting five or six or these MSNBC ones a day, and the head­lines vary. This lat­est one to the left has a head­line that says the Bea­t­les are get­ting back together — what, you’re telling me YOU guys wouldn’t want to read that story? I gather that if you click on the link, you just go to a ‘page not found’ Web­page on the MSNBC site. But accord­ing to this arti­cle on Snopes, what has actu­ally hap­pened is that you’ve acti­vated a virus called “Storm worm,”  that has been around for awhile with dif­fer­ent meth­ods of delivery.

    The FBI got involved in one of the ear­lier ver­sions of the virus, and here’s how they explained what happens:

    Click­ing on the link down­loads mal­ware onto the Internet-connected device, caus­ing it to become infected with the virus and part of the Storm Worm bot­net. A bot­net is a col­lec­tion of com­pro­mised com­put­ers under the remote com­mand and con­trol of a crim­i­nal ‘both­erder.’ Most own­ers of the com­pro­mised com­put­ers are unsus­pect­ing vic­tims. They have unin­ten­tion­ally allowed unau­tho­rized access and use of their com­put­ers as a vehi­cle to facil­i­tate other crimes, such as iden­tity theft, denial-of-service attacks, phish­ing, click fraud, and the mass dis­tri­b­u­tion of spam and spy­ware. Because of their widely dis­trib­uted capa­bil­i­ties, bot­nets are a grow­ing threat to national secu­rity, the national infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture and the economy.

    Bot­nets with both­erders? This sounds like some­thing from a sci-fi graphic novel. But hav­ing these things pop­ping into my mail­box every cou­ple hours is just freak­ing me out. Did I ever click on that link? I don’t remem­ber! I clicked on the one that was sup­posed to let you unsub­scribe, but that one doesn’t do any­thing. I’ve tried to des­ig­nate the incom­ing ‘MSNBC’ e-mail as spam, but they’re always com­ing from dif­fer­ent sources — likely from other infected com­put­ers — and so they just keep com­ing. And are there other e-mails going out right now from my com­puter? I don’t even know.

    As the Wicked Witch said as she melted away, “What a world, what a world!”


    Related posts:

    1. Hacker alert!
    2. What makes kids happy — an afterthought
    3. The S-word
    4. My spam avatar
    5. Myths and truth

    August 16th, 2008 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Word­mama 08.16.2008

    There ought to be a for­mula some­where for the amount of time between the inven­tion of a new tech­nol­ogy and the dis­cov­ery of a way to use it to defraud peo­ple. Seems like nanosec­onds some­times. Sounds like this would be a good time for a full-system scan by your virus checker.

  • Grace

    Greg’s more aware of the ongo­ing scans than I am. The com­puter is set up to check itself for a whole bunch of stuff already. I’ll get with him once he gets back into town to find out if he thinks I have to wipe the hard disk clean and rein­stall all my soft­ware or whatever.

  • s-p

    Ohhh… nuke and re-pave? I hope not. I hate it when that happens.

  • Grace

    Phew! Major phew! It just occurred to me that I could check the his­tory func­tion to see if I had ever gone off to the offend­ing site — no, I didn’t. Big relief.

    I’ll just men­tion that in the past day or so I’ve noticed that the “head­lines” on these e-mails have got­ten a lit­tle bizarre — “Osama bin Laden blows him­self up”? “Cindy McCain talks about her boobs”?? Don’t know if that’s just try­ing to turn up the vol­ume on get­ting peo­ple to click through, or if the evil geniuses behind all this are start­ing to get bizarre.

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