*Sigh*

[rivendellrose]

Well... this has been an interesting day.

All was well at work, I remembered to go grocery shopping, and even managed to post before going off to my second job. I'm also significantly less upset about the situation in the RP, which should relieve all those who've put up with my ranting and whining the last few days. I'm still going to talk to *someone* once I get the information I need, but I'm not desiring to tear out their throat... so that's good. Not good for me to get pissed off like that while in the middle of reading yet another Anita Blake book (and having just finished the previous one...)

Anyway... but something rather interesting happened this afternoon. I received an email, through my UW account, informing me that an email I'd sent to someplace I'd never heard of had contained a virus. So, I ran Norton. Nothing. When I got home from work, I had *another* email, this time from a university in Australia (!!!) informing me of another virus. This one, happily, was kind enough to say that "Some viruses will forge the sender of the e-mail. Which means you may be receiving this message in error."

No kidding, considering I a) have never even *heard* of this place, let alone sent them an email, and b) already ran scan-disk *just today* and found nothing. Obviously I need to take this up with Chris, our resident tech-guru, and/or anybody else who's got some advice.

Once again, I'm not a happy kitty. I will be a very *lost* little kitty if my computer gets hurt.

[Edit] Ran scan-disk again because last time I stopped it a bit early because it didn't seem to be finishing. Everything came up clean. And I talked to Chris, he thinks it's highly unlikely I'm infected. So all is apparently good.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'd agree that you're safe, but you might want to pass a message on to anybody who might have your e-mail address in their address book. If you didn't send the message, then either a) the virus managed to randomly generate your e-mail address or b) the virus read it somewhere. Maybe the virus got your e-mail address out of an address book, then sent copies of itself to other people in the address book. Do you know anybody with friends in Australia? If so, you might want to give them a heads up. Which I guess you're kind of doing, actually.

That's just guesswork, though. You also might want to make sure you have the latest virus definitions for Norton. I think you can get those at http://www.symantec.com/downloads .

[(Anonymous)]

Allow me to update what I said before.

One of your friends probably has a virus called SoBig.F. There's a description of it at http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/3/2003/08/19/story008.html , but to quote the relevant parts:

"The e-mail message that carries Sobig.F has the subject line 'Re: Details' and the message 'Please see attached file for details.' If a recipient clicks on the attachment, which can have multiple names ending in the .pif file extension, the computer will be infected.
"The virus will then send itself out to names found in the victim's address book and will use one of these names to forge a return address. As such, the infected party may not quickly learn of the infection, while an innocent party may get the blame for helping to propagate it."

So, yeah, you should probably notify your e-mail buddies, although the article says the virus will self-destruct on the tenth of September.

-- Josh

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

*Growls* This whole thing is so frustrating.... stupid viruses. Stupid people who /make/ viruses.

Anyway, thanks. And how are you? I haven't heard from you in a while--hope everything's going well.