Need help with Spam Issue

Originally posted by Tarcoon

The only problem is:

the first who gets the virus wich sends itself to the adresses kept in the adressbook gets the mail-daemons messages. But that would be a sign for him a virus is resident on his computer.

Now guys - did you change your adresses?

Changing the addresses on my system doesn't help me or my provider at all. It also doesn't prevent me from getting "returns" from the Mailer-daemons.
I'm getting about 20 mail daemon messages a day now for mails I never sent just because some people are infected and have my address in their address book. The virus is not on my computer, and I don't use Outlook anyhow

I even got one from "myself" today. Because the virus fakes the senders address by randomly choosing one among the addresses in the book and then sends that mail to another randomly chosen recipient. The originator doesn't get the mailer daemon message, I do. Because my address was faked in as the sender

You could easily get a mail from my address (that I didn't send) if someone has both your and my address in his book.

I doubt anyone who doesn't bother to update his virus protection will bother with changing the addresses in his address book.

Have Gun, Will Travel

Can a virus look through a drive to find files with email addys in them?

One easy way seems to be keeping a notepad document on the desktop which contains the addresses you typically send to. Then, when composing an email, you just cut and paste the address. The address book is circumvented, and little time is lost typing in addresses.

In addition, I wonder if you can put your own address in the address book. And make it the only one there. That would provide a warning if you've been infected. If you ever get an email from yourself, you know something's going on.

Can a virus search for email addresses (in a notepad file named some random name) across a drive?

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

Have you been able to track down who was infected? Perhaps the best solution is try to figure out which computer is doing the sending - and get that machine cleaned up. The mails bounce back to you because they have you as the sender. If the virus is picking targets out of the infected computers address book, perhaps it would give a clue as to who the sender is.

-Gtrout

Nope, I don't recognize any of the addresses the mails were sent to, so I can't even guess where they might have originated. I surely would inform the originator that his/her system is infected if I could find out who it is
Most of the headers are incomplete. On the few complete ones I can identify the IP address of the email provider where the mail was originated, but not the originator himself. (most of the providers are also unknown to me). Currently I see little chance to track down who is infected, and there must be several of them.

I have 3 email accounts on the same PC and use the same email client for all of them. I haven't had a single mailer-daemon return on the other 2 accounts.

Have Gun, Will Travel

There's not a lot you can do about spam short of changing your address and that's only temporary. To avoid viruses I use AVG anti-virus and Sygate's personal firewall. On top of this I never download emails directly, only the headers (MS Outlook 2002). Sort out what I want then process.

Don't be so narrow minded and egoistic guys, try to look over your horizon;)

We can start it here and now!
It's a kind of countermeasure against worms and spam and viruses if everybody joins in.
Do it and tell your friends to do it and they tell it their friends and so on...
MT you are right, you don't have any virus and you are not the source of any spam or whatever. It's one of your friends who spams you now, but he doesn't know it.
If he would have added some letters to his stored addresses you wouldn't have a problem. And the problem will be persistent - even if you change your address.
Shane asks if a virus/trojan is able to serch through a hard disk.
It is - it looks for your e-mail addresses or for some credit card numbers or for whatever its creator wants it to look for.
Edit: not itself, but it enables its creator to do it!!/edit
It may switch your firewall off, open some ports and send information
to its father.
(by the way: sygate is rather secure in resisting against "switching off" - as long as we may trust some tests of pc magazines)

And it's vital to keep your virus signatures up to date, sure.
But a virus scanner is reactive - it finds known viruses. A new one - like MyDoom - will spread untill a signature update is ready and downloaded by the users. That takes some time. MyDoom Party Time!

Now coming back to my suggestion:
what hinders you to add some letters and tell your friends to do the same. If everybody of your friends stores invalid addresses in his addressbook - wouldn't you be safe? You take care for their security and they take care for yours - aren't they friends?

O.k. - if you post your e-mail address everywhere and open every e-mail from "lilly - just for you boy" including its attachment it will be hard to help you.