Yahoo mail and that stupid virus
 

Is there anyone else out there who's account keeps getting filled with that stupid virus being sent around? My school email must have finally gotten a virus filter to stop it, but both of my yahoo account keep getting tons of them. Of course i'm not going to open them, but at around 100K each they start adding up and keep bumping my acounts over quota.

I am so stupid when it comes to the patches and everything. I tried to download, but it wouldn't. The next day, all thes e-mail are coming in saying your mail has been returned due to a virus-virus on your computer etc... When I pull down the details, I never even SENT an e-mail to these people. I have only family in my address book, and rarely send anything outside of them.
Is this just a hook, or are these mail notifications real??? I do NOT download attachments unless they are from my brother-in-law who is a security hound.

I think what happens is that when the virus infects someone, it takes *their* address book and uses those addresses as the From: address to send the virus out.

For example: "Alphie" has my "adpi-vu" yahoo address in her address book, and gets the virus. Her infected computer now sends emails to "Rose" and "Anchor," others on her address list, but the emails appear to come from "adpi-vu."

Sucks, don't it? Because the messages end up swamping someone and then the "adpi-vu" account gets both "Mail Delivery Subsystem -- Mail Returned" messages and "You sent our system a virus" messages... neither of which actually came from that account.

I had a virus similar to that once. I was sending random emails to people I didn't even know. What this virus was doing was taking all the email addresses on my computer. So If I received a forward from a friend but it had been forwared 100 times before that this virus would send an email to who ever was addressed in the forward even if they weren't in my address book. It was weird to because in the email the subject name was taken from a file I had saved on my computer that wasn't an email.

I had typed up several poems that I was thinking of given to my little sister and I titled it Pi Phi Poems. Well the subject in the email that my computer was sending to people was called Pi Phi Poems. It was odd because I had never emailed them to anyone, yet that was the name of the email.

If a virus does send out e-mail to people in your address book, would it show up as "sent mail" or would it be hidden?

My yahoo email is also under attack. Strangely enough it's my ancient and unused @geocities.com address that's been mined for this attack and not my @yahoo.com one. Go figure. Yahoo email is darned handy at times, but this kind of thing is just a big PITA!

in my yahoo account, i have a regular mail box and a bulk mail box. all of the junk mail always shows up in the bulk mail box. so whenever new mail comes in that box, i empty without giving it a look. i think that bulk mail box is pointless. so i probably had the virus mail sent to me, i just never knew it.

justamom: Hidden

Who is creating these viruses?
Is it some little high school computer dork?

It's that damn Grapist!!

They'd have to be a pretty advanced h.s. student to pull off this sort of attack. :eek:

Its sad that there are such talented people out there, using their abilities to wreak havoc instead of putting those skill to use and improving things. :(

I've been having the same "emails" sent to my yahoo bulk mail account. I just delete the whole box and empty my trash afterwards. Hopefully, this virus will die down soon cause it's annoying!

I tried to find a picture of the Scooby Gang unmasking a cartoon villain so I could post it with an 'and I would've got away with it if it weren't for you pesky kids!' caption but couldn't find one. Guess I'll have to give a serious reply instead. Sigh. Quite possibly. The source code for most viruses is of course available on the 'Net. Newsgroup, forums and websites all discuss security problems discovered with computers, the latest viruses etc and how to write virii. Some people see it as a challenge, or a way of getting their names out there; much like graffiti.

Since you ask, from what is known most authors ARE high school or college students. Most are accomplished programmers in assembly language and other languages (those are different types of writing programs). Motives vary; as mentioned before a popular motive is notoriety, some are written to honor the author's hero, a funny game, a way to spread sociopolitical messages or some are written by tools in love - scripting messages to their girlfriends to flash on the computer screens of millions of people. A graph of when new viruses emerge shows peaks in the same months that high school and college students have their vacations - it's no coincidence there's a glut around now! The war between virus authors and anti-virus software companies raged even before Windows. Even MS-DOS 6 came with an antivirus program. As military historians know, volunteers often fight harder than paid mercenaries. Like a true zealot, a virus author is quite willing to stay up all hours, programmers working on anti-virus products on the other hand, generally go home at 5 pm. The battle won't end anytime soon.
The number of viruses in the world doubles probably about every ten months, some are rare and perhaps never found "in the wild" i.e outside the virus researcher's labs. In the past viruses took a long time to spread even with online BBS's. With the advent of the Internet, viruses spread covertly from system to system, reaching thousands of people in moments. As you have seen, new viruses are often written to take advantage of this convenient carrier system (e.g. 'email viruses').

In terms of what people can do to protect themselves, it's generally a matter of getting a decent anti-virus product and getting regular updates, plus applying relevant security updates for your system as they come out to avoid infection. The important thing is to subscribe for regular updates to your anti-virus software. Particularly for high risk users - these days anyone who shares software or connects unprotected to the 'Net. In days gone by one could probably get a shareware package to do the work, but with the vast amount of sites devoted to subverting computer security and writing viruses with how-to guides, it is no longer possible for people with limited resources to write cheap anti-virus software and update it when new viruses come up. Consequently we're at the mercy of anti-virus product companies as well as all those students. A shame p'raps but them's the breaks.

Don't be hating on The Grapist! :p


Yeah, I'm getting the Yahoo virus spam, too. I got over 60 messages on Tuesday with the stupid virus attachment. Haven't gotten any yet today. *knocks wood* It makes me mad because Yahoo is usually really good about blocking spam; I've never gotten a spam message in my account.

I sent the Yahoo help an e-mail about it asking them how I can stop it, but I'm not expecting a reply anytime soon. I'm kind of surprised that they haven't sent some sort of all users e-mail about it, though.

I got it today as well, yahoo has been reliable otherwise.

What continues to boggle my mind is the fact that anybody is *opening* the infected email. Does anyone really have friends sending them stuff like "wicked screensaver" or whatever?

i have been getting about 30 emails a day in that yahoo account and it's all virus related. I am already sick of it. Is there any way to up your bulk mail's sensitivity? I get majority of the emails in bulk, but some still make it to my inbox.

I have a Yahoo account, but I haven't gotten any of those viruses there. If I do get one of those emails, I will delete them immediately.

The best thing to do is to delete and empty the trash!

http://216.40.249.192/s/contrib/sarge/Mad_anim.gif

I have also been overloaded with these emails in my yahoo account. All the return address are @whatever.edu--- my inbox in constantly overflowing and I have run out of room numerous times in the past 2 days.
Ughhh-- if any one figures out how to stop these--please post!

-wendi

Lately, I have been getting email from an unidentified person, only the domain identified. I have had those deleted since I don't know who it is from. Is it possible that somebody has been sending a virus? Very concerned about this!

http://www.handykult.de/plaudersmilies.de/uhoh3.gif

smiley21 - in my yahoo account, i have a regular mail box and a bulk mail box. all of the junk mail always shows up in the bulk mail box. so whenever new mail comes in that box, i empty without giving it a look.
Smiley, it is unusual but sometimes messages that you *do* want (ie non-SPAM) get delivered to the Bulk Mail box by mistake. You can then click when you open the message "This is not spam" so Yahoo can improve their bulk mail filter for next time. They'd get there because they were automated messages for example but not spam and so they seemed to be spam to the bulk filter. :). As an example, I once got the 'new reply to thread' GreekChat notification email in there :) I haven't had it land there since so I guess Yahoo improved the filter! Consequently, it's always an idea to have a momentary glance before deleting. Sometimes even I don't bother of course, particularly if there's a load of emails in the folder - figuring I'll live if one was important!

chideltjen - i have been getting about 30 emails a day in that yahoo account and it's all virus related. I am already sick of it. Is there any way to up your bulk mail's sensitivity? I get majority of the emails in bulk, but some still make it to my inbox.
Jen, no. You can upgrade to the paid Yahoo Mail Plus service, which you pay monthly/yearly for. It - supposedly - has a better & more powerful bulk filter. But since we're students screw that :). Instead, it's a matter of (for any that make it to your inbox) either not opening them (if it's obvious they're spam) and clicking on the checkbox to the left of the email in the Inbox list and then selecting "This is Spam" from the pull down menu which reads "mark as unread' as the first item and clicking "ok". Or, if you have opened the mail [and discovered it's spam] then clicking on "This is Spam" which is in the header of the mail; so that it gets sent to Yahoo to help them improve the bulk mail filter. The idea being to have the effect of helping them get it to the bulk mail box first time, the next time. Hmm... upon reflection I guess you can try going to Mail Options, clicking 'Filters', and setting it up so that if the "To/cc: header" doesn't contain your email addy then send directly to the Trash, or, if the subject/body contains, say a word always in the virus emails but you're sure'll never be in a legitimate email then also send to the Trash folder etc. Anything currently in the Trash still takes up space - but - the Trash folder is periodically emptied by Yahoo plus you can enter it manually if you see there's stuff in it.

alphagam-alum: I have also been overloaded with these emails in my yahoo account. All the return address are @whatever.edu--- my inbox in constantly overflowing and I have run out of room numerous times in the past 2 days.
Hmm... well if it always comes from the same domain eg. random&changes_everytime_bit_here@this_part_stayst hesame.edu then you can click on "Mail Options", next click "Block Addresses" and enter the domain to block. So none of those mails will be allowed to ever reach you; this is presuming you're SURE legitimate mails won't come from that domain to you. Blocking email adresses isn't always useful as spammers tend to put a random word before the @ sign and changing it for each spam. Blocking a domain is obviously slightly more useful :-).

Justamom: I think you asked about how come Yahoo haven't sent out a customer notice. They have in the Tip of the Day which appears on the front page of Yahoo Mail, put a virus warning; they did that with another one a few weeks back. That's pretty unusual for them :-).

CatStarESP4: Lately, I have been getting email from an unidentified person, only the domain identified. I have had those deleted since I don't know who it is from. Is it possible that somebody has been sending a virus? Very concerned about this! Well Miss big sig :p, Without seeing the mails I can't tell, but it could be spam or have a virus attached. If there's no attachment... there wouldn't be a virus attached :-) As for whether one opens a Yahoo mail which says it has an attachment and you glance then at the filename and you THEN think it may be the virus (e.g because it ends in .pif or .src) , unless you save the attachment or run it, then it is not too likely to get to cause harm to your PC :-). It can't leap out ;). N.B it's a bit different in Outlook and other programs because they ARE downloading the messages to your PC for you to read them; with Yahoo they remain on the server. I'm not sure what you mean by an unidentified person? Whether that means the sender is unidentified@domain.com literally or just that you don't know (recognise) the sender name. If you mean the address is literally unidentified@whatever.com then delete it as no-one legitimate would deliberately set up their email address to be unidentified@whatever.com unless they had a starring role in Dumb and Dumberer.

... The final standard rules for spam apply. Never ever never click the "unsubscribe" or "remove me" links on a definite spam email, it only confirms that yours is a valid address and so your address is more likely to end up on the "Premium verified" - more expensive email lists, that are sold to scum. Sorry spammers ;). If it's obviously spam, don't bother opening it e.g. if the subject line is "Increase your girth" or "Bigger breasts no consultation neeeded!" etc.
It's also an idea to go into Yahoo Mail options, click General Preferences and select the "Block HTML graphics in email messages from being downloaded.". Yeah you miss out on some legitimate pretty graphics maybe but you also avoid - if it is spam - the graphics being secret numbered graphics which when downloaded for your message send a note to the spammer to say that *your* address downloaded them thus telling them your email address is "live".

I've no idea whatsoever if any of this post was any use. But I'm gonna click send now anyway. :)

Richard.

edited for spelling.

Yahoo finally put the virus warning on its "Tip of the Day" today. It's only about a week late, thanks. :rolleyes:

I think most people have figured out NOT to open it.

However, I wish yahoo would find a way to make the messages STOP. Both my personal account and my law fraternity's account keep on getting pushed over quota. I haven't gotten ANY of these messages on my school's email (and they do NOT have a filter to block viruses). If i don't check them for more than a few hours, they'll be over quota. ARGH. Just ticks me off b/c they're both important email addresses to me right now.

Ick..stupid virus. It was sent to me by my boyfriend's account. Damn him!! His computer actually got infected-infected...very messy.

PS- Make friend's w/a hacker, it's a nice way to have security :) Yes, I have a good friend that is one..he's taught me many things..heh :)

I've no idea whatsoever if any of this post was any use. But I'm gonna click send now anyway.

It was of GREAT use to me!!! THANKS!

When is it going to go away? I had it in my bulk mail folder SEVEN times today. The hell?!