virus attachments from some mathgroup users
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg41839] virus attachments from some mathgroup users
- From: "Steven M. Christensen" <steve at smc.vnet.net>
- Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2003 09:51:18 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Attention Mathgroup users - Some readers have emailed me pointing out what appear to be virus attachments in MathGroup mailings. If you don't follow virus information on the net as closely as I do, you may not know about a new virus (and there are still other older viruses around) that is quite bad for Microsoft Windows users. I do not use Windows unless I am forced to, but I know others do and I have a number of Windows machines around for testing so I can make warnings like this. Go to http://sarc.com and see the W32.Bugbear.B link for details and the story on the lower part of the main page. If you run Windows and are not keeping up with anti-virus software (though this virus came up faster than the anti-virus people could update their software) and the seemingly infinite Windows update patches (some of which may "break" your Windows OS), then you may be vulnerable. What may happen is that the virus will search your machine for email addresses anywhere on your hard disk and then send the virus out to others who are not protected. So, someone out there likely has the virus and may have started mailing out to the email addresses from MathGroup they may have saved in their systems mailboxes or newsgroup save files. Note that if you get a message from MathGroup that has an attachment it DID NOT COME FROM MATHGROUP! I never send out attachments. I never send mail from a Windows machine. I use only Sun workstations with Solaris for mail which are not prone to viruses and I hand edit out any attachments. As you may know if you send posts with attachments, I edit them out - so don't send them in the first place. Further if you use a mailer that sends out html mail or attachments I will have to edit those out by hand also - so adjust your mail client to not send out html. My editing may mess up your messages or they may end up looking like spam to my spam filters. Contact me with any questions. Steve Christensen Moderator