Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, March 03, 2004 at 12:13PM :
In Reply to: Someone has a virus.... posted by Jonas on Wednesday, March 03, 2004 at 10:43AM :
I just got sent a new virus that claimed that my own website was sending out lots of viruses and I should run the anti-virus program they had helpfully attached. This one had a long subject line and quite several paragraphs of text that was in pretty good english. Of course the attached .zip file contained a .exe which I assume was a virus. Those guys are getting sneakier all the time.
You can't infect your computer just by looking at an email with a vague subject line that happens to contain an attached virus, however. You'll only get infected if you open the attached file. "opening" the email, as in just reading the text part, is safe. But by all means don't run attached .exes unless you know for sure that they're good. Sometimes the virus guys put a fake extension on the file, and if you have "display extensions" turned off, you won't see that it's an exe. I've gotten virus emails that said something like "Look at this picture!" and there was a file attached with a name like "foo.jpg.exe". If I didn't see the "real" exe extension, I would think it was just "foo.jpg", which could not be a virus. .exe, .com, and .pif are the "executable" extensions.
After a while you learn to recognise the style of virus emails, just like the nigerian scams. Fortunately the virus that are going around this winter mostly just send themselves to other people, rather than doing any damage to your computer. That means if you get infected, you can go to a site like norton.com and follow the instructions for getting rid of it, even if you don't buy their anti-virus program.
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