Aquarionics

Infected

I just avoided getting infected by Beagle by my virus checker.

I got this e-mail:

Dear user of Tmbg.org,


	
Our main mailing server will  be  temporary unavaible  for next two days, 
to  continue receiving mail in  these days you have to configure our  free
auto-forwarding  service.

	
For details see the attached  file.

	
In order  to read the attach you have to use the following  password: 04185.

	
Have a good  day,
    The  Tmbg.org team                             http://www.tmbg.org

to my drw0rm@tmbg.org address (The address I occasionally use on usenet). Now, apparently it’s purely coincidence that it happened to pick the right body (tmbg.org _is_ a free forwarding service, and has had a couple of problems recently) and looks roughly right, but it fooled me (In my defence, it’s first thing in the morning, I haven’t had my tea yet, and I’m dosed up to the eyeballs with cold remedies) and if it can get me – who knows about these things – it scares me how many others it would have got.

The only reason I have Norton installed at all is that yesterday we had a virus scare in the office when a co-worker opened an attachment ‘from’ the CEO and he got an e-mail to himself from a mangled form of his address. After scanning the headers, we unplugged her PC from the network, grabbed Norton and the latest signatures (More difficult than it should be, since Norton’s site focuses on you using the Auto Update service, but since we couldn’t put the computer online until it was disinfected these were recommendations we couldn’t follow) (Incidentally, Norton at 25mb & another couple for the signature file made me once again glad of the pen drive for transferring them).

It took just under two hours to do a full sweep of her machine – during which she couldn’t do very much – and about the same length of my time over the course of the day to sort out the thing, which is about four hours of company time yesterday wasted on a virus (Or, to put it another way, given how big a company we are, one third of the company out of action for quarter of the working day).

Incidentally, recommendations to switch to another OS will be laughed at, since of the office me and this co-worker are the only people not using OS X, and it’s kind of useful to have at least two people using the platform we’re currently developing for.

Not that I would refuse an iBook if offered, of course.

This arrived this morning:

Dear  user  of  e-mail server "Aquarionics.com",


	
Some  of our clients complained about  the spam  (negative e-mail content)
outgoing  from  your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by
a  proxy-relay  trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe,
follow  the instructions.

	
Advanced  details can be found  in attached file.

	
For  security reasons attached file is password protected. The password  is "80362".

	
Have a good day,
    The Aquarionics.com  team                               http://www.aquarionics.com

Pity I didn’t recieve this one first, really.