A Bad SPAM/Virus/Worm Day!

ARGH!! Is anyone else getting SPAMMED like crazy today? The majority of mine, I suspect they're infected, are FROM an email address and not a name and the subject line is HI or HELLO. We heard about this one here at work a few days ago but today has been something special! I'm also getting a lot of "Mail Daemon: Return To Sender" which appear to have been sent by a person's name@madridman.com ! For example, linda@madridman.com or jeff@madridman.com and these email addresses, of course, do not exist. ARGH! Thank goodness I view ALL of my email online in HTML format so there's no chance (or less) that I'll infect my own compter. I can just check all the boxes and delete them in one fell swoop.

SOME of these incoming RETURN TO SENDER are from some hostels in Spain I know so there's definitely SOME connection there.

Anyone having a bad SPAM day? Saludos, MadridMan

Hey madridman and gang...

Yep, I am getting hit here too...and on a private email address, not my public yahoo and hotmail accounts!

I am getting the same messages of the "hi" and "hello" ones mentioned by Madridman...They are coming from addresses unknown to me.

I also got at least 5-6 undeliverable messages.... messages that I didn´t send!

I have also gotten two asking me to click on a link to update my birthday information. These mails came from personal friends, neither of whom sent me the messages.

I think I heard on the news that there is a major virus going around and it has hit several large businesses in the US. Can anyone confirm this?

Here's the latest from our IT people at work - as of this morning:

Virus Name: Dumaru
Two similar new variants of the Dumaru virus appeared on the Internet this weekend. The first Dumaru virus popped up last August, but did not spread enough to pose a serious threat. However, Dumaru.Y and .Z seem to have taken hold, probably because the virus payload travels as a compressed e-mail attachment. Such an approach may sneak past perimeter filtering, since most adminstrators allow .zip files to enter. If one of your users opens and runs Dumaru's zipped executable, the virus steals the victim's personal information and installs a back door that could allow the virus author full control of your user's computer.

The following describes the MYDOOM virus that is currently a major problem in email systems worldwide.

The email will have the following characteristics:

From: may be a fake address

Subject:
(one of the following)
test
hi
hello
Mail Delivery System
Mail Transaction Failed
Server Report
Status
Error

Message:
(one of the following)
Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available.
The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment.
The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment.

Attachment:
(one of the following)
document
readme
doc
text
file
data
test
message
body

I received yesterday or the day before, an unknown sender email with an attached file. I deleted it without opening, that's why my PC wasn't infected.

Yes, there have been warnings all the morning (now it's 5.50 PM here) about a worm that was spreading through the net.

It's not a spanih worm, I believe, since, at least, the one I received was a message in english.

Since writing the original, above posting I've had about 400 more emails, potentially infected, all with the subjects that many of you have posted above. Annoying, isn't it? We're trying to weed through hundreds of these things in order to find the one personal one from our sister or client or friend in Spain and sometimes those personal emails get deleted along with the nasty ones.

We too got the email this afternoon from the IT people about what to do and what not to do, described the situation, etcetera. What a pain.

A number of them, the sender's "name", have an email address and no actual name. But the strange thing is, many of them are semi-familiar. However, do you think there REALLY is a debby@elmundo.es or dan@hostalcentrosol.com ?? Doubt it. But the "fake" list of senders is interesting.

This is a pretty informative and reliable article about the new worm:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/pcworld/20040127/tc_pcworld/114461.

Good luck,

Juan

Please can someone tell me how to delete the mail message before opening it? I don't have check boxes or anything If I right click on it, it's going to open it isn't it?

Grrr - typical too, just when my antivirus stuff ran out a couple of days ago and I'm trying to sort out new cover.

I have the MAILER DAEMON just arrived in my in-box - it's unopened of course, but I need to know how to make it go away

Thanks for your help .... anyone?

Hi Jo-Anne! Can you read your email online in HTML version through your internet service provider? Many will now have this feature - their website and look for Web Mail.

What kind of email program do you use? Is it the "leaky" Microsoft Outlook Express or maybe Eudora ?

You may be able to find a setting in your "PROPERTIES" where you choose to NOT activate the message in the lower panel by simply "touching" it with your mouse pointer.

I had another 600 of these emails messages since last night!! Ugh! Some were from anne@hotelpuertadetoledo.es & bill@elcorteingles.es .

Saludos, MadridMan

The Spanish Ministery of Science and Technology has a very interesting website on viruses and computer security. You can read more information about the Mimail.R virus.

Jo, Madridman is right. Try checking your e-mail through the webmail interface. Then you will just have to clik on the delete "box" when you see any suspicious message.

Again, I would follow Madridman's advice and change from Outlook Express to another e-mail software. The latest version of Eudora has an "intelligent" spam filter. However, this feature is only available on the paid version. The same system is included in Mozilla .

By the way, you can try MailWasher Pro . It's an e-mail notifier. It check whether you have e-mail every 10 minutes, showing the e-mail headers. You can use that information to delete spam and viruses.

Let me know if you have any problems with the registration process ;-)

Woke up to ONLY 260 SPAM/VIRUS/WORM emails this morning and read a USATODAY article entitled
Microsoft offers $250,000 reward to help catch author of virus.

Read the rest of the article HERE . Ugh.

Saludos, MadridMan