Posted by Todd Wilson on Thursday, March 04, 2004 at 11:30AM :
In Reply to: Re: Someone has a virus.... posted by Paul Cook on Wednesday, March 03, 2004 at 7:49PM :
Most worms now harvest email address's anyway they can. Some thru address books but mostly through cache files on your hard drive from surfing the web. Anytime you post your email address its there for the taking. This web site is a great site for worms and spammers as they can scan the web site and the archives and get email address's from Forum #1 if they want.
Most new worms now can access other hard drives through shares and or a network. So some one on this forum could be at work and a co-worker could have the worm and the share between their computers could harvest email address's from thier computer and go that way. Its possible no one on this web site has the worm but a co worker or someone on their network does.
Most new worms have thier own SMTP engine to send email out on their own. Lots of ISP's are starting to do some tricks to cut down on crap email but most email servers will accept any email that shows up. Sometimes the email gets delivered and sometimes it gets bounced back. If your email address is used for the sender then you get the famous Undeliverable Email subject that is actually coming from a real email server because it doesnt know any better.
It all snowballs and gets bigger and bigger causing problems everywhere. I wonder how fast the internet would be if the crap was cut off.
Todd