ZPEnergy.com - Virus spam

Here is a message from the Vortex list (posted by Harvey Norris) shedding more light on the recent virus problem which affected so many of us:

"Just to warn everybody...this latest virus going around has, as far as I can tell, a brand new trick that I have not seen yet and it's ugly. It is grabbing email addresses off of websites, perhaps other places, forging those addresses as the "sender" and "reply-to" addresses, and then sending out its payload to others.

What this means in "English" is that while you may not have a virus on your system, but you will be falsely accused of having sent such a virus. This may, of course, be alarming, but needed be if your computer is "clean". These warnings are sent by an automated software robot, not a human. Any intelligent email sysadmin or network engineer knows that virtually any email header can be forged. For example, Citibank was a typical target of such a forgery just a few days ago."

I today recieved a message from Yahoo Groups Administration, ( or an entity pretending to be that source!) It said it was unable to deliver a message I had sent to Yahoo's Tesla Turbine list. Also I have got failure delivery notices to messages to freenrg, even though messages were delivered with no problem, but I didn't detect any viruses in those replies... But I am not a member of that Tesla Turbine list, and had sent no message! The the message had an attachment that indicated , Here's your returned message. Norton scan of that message indicated the Sobig virus.

I began wondering whether in fact my computer was infected, since that is what happens with viruses, they send out unauthorized meessages pretending to be you! I was infected once before a long time ago, and just happened to be on line when a virus from my address began infecting the Newman coil list that Stephan Hartmann had started. What it did was a repeat message about every 3 minutes... The only way to stop recieving this flood of email was to withdraw from the list!"