Suspicious e-mails

[Paul.Tait]

I had around 40 mails in my box this morning that I wouldn't normally expect to find there. They were all from seemingly legitimate e-mail addresses (none of which I had ever heard of before), all had attachments (either body.zip, test.zip or document.zip), and all contained the following text in the message;

'This message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment'

Does this sound like it might be the work of Mydoom? I obviously won't open any attachments, but should I send e-mails to the addresses concerned to warn them that they may be unsuspectingly sending out a virus?

Thanks

Paul

[kelly]

Yes Paul. No point trying to inform anyone.

"This is a mass-mailing worm that arrives in an email message as follows:

From:  (spoofed)
 Subject:  (Random)
 Body:   (Varies, such as) 

The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment.

The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment.

Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available.

Attachment:  (varies [.exe, .pif, .cmd, .scr] - often arrives in a ZIP archive) (22,528 bytes)

The icon used by the file tries to make it appear as if the attachment is a text file."


http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=mydoom

[Paddy]

If anything, I've received more of this darn virus/bounces resulting from it in the past 24 hours than since it first appeared. Most of my inbox clutter is from various mailer daemons etc. informing me that "the email I sent to (some person I've never heard of before) could not be delivered because it contained a virus"....ie: someone who is infected has me in their email address book and my email addresses (two of them) are being used as the spoofed "from" line. Argh.  

[Xairbusdriver]

The sad part is that most of the people don't know their address books are being used. I don't see how this kind of problem will ever be solved as long as (1) people continue to open attachments without knowing why they got them, (2) people refuse to upgrade their OS/programs that supposedly have fixes for this behavior and (3) people don't want to take the time to understand how vulnerable their computers are and how to protect themselves.  

Paul:
There is no need to fear this virus, it runs only on Windows, even if you tried to open the attachment, nothing would happen. You should still be careful about doing that, however, if you use Outlook, or some other MS e-mail program. Many of these virus are actually macros that run inside the MS program and they may be able to affect a Mac.

Secondly, the person who sent the message is not likely to be anywhere in the message. The reason you are getting the message, is that the virus used your address as the sender and then created a bogus recipient so the message would go to you. This method makes it harder to figure out where the message originated and confuses many people to open it because they think they made a mistake or maybe misstyped the address on something they sent. All in all a fairly clever (deceitful) method, IMHO. At least this is the way I understand this virus works...