Virus Emails and Email Spoofing Viruses

Viruses and Email Spoofing...

We control a great deal of domain names and websites, some are our own and some we look after on behalf of our customers. This page answers the questions we are often asked...

• Why am I getting email messages that make no sense?
• What should I do with emails containing attachments?
• Why are people replying to emails that I never sent? Does my computer have a virus?

Computer viruses are an established part of the computer scene nowadays. The proliferation of internet connectivity in terms of number of people surfing / emailing and in terms of increases in 'always on' broadband usage rather than dialup modem have meant that viruses have flourished massively over the past few years. This trend is unlikely to change.

Computer viruses are a pain the rear and cost companies billions on an annual basis as well as being responsible for damaging and deleting a mass of important data and electronic files putting people and businesses to no end of inconvenience. Ok, so we don't like comoputer viruses.

These computer viruses need a way of propogating and a common way for this to be done is via email, the general cycle / process of computer virus infections goes something like this...

1. Unsuspecting surfer / internet user checks their email..
2. They open a message they have received...
3. They open the attachment to the email...
4. The email virus has now been loaded and starts to work...
5. The virus may open 'back doors' into your system that allow other people (hackers) to access your computers...
6. The virus invariably will try to replicate itself on other PC's by virtue of your internet connection. It does this by sifting through your Outlook / Outlook Express etc email program looking in your Inbox / Sent Items / Address Book etc and collects a list of all the email addresses that you have contacted or have contacted you...
7. The virus then emails a copy of itself to all the emails it just collected!
8. But, to avoid premature detection of the virus and its removal the virus 'spoofs' the email address that has been sent from. This means that the virus 'appears' to have sent the email from an email account that is NOT set up on the computer that it actually was sent from! This makes tracing the infected PC (and email account) much harder than just looking at the email's 'From' address box!
9. Unless antivirus software is running on the mail servers that the infected email goes through and / or on the PC that the email is sent to then the virus infection spreads to a new host PC :-(
10. The cycle repeats itself...

Symptoms of computer virus infection include the computer behaving 'oddly', becoming very slow, and increased network activity without explanation... if this describes your computer then it would be wise to do something about it.

Some conclusions then...

• if you receive an nonsense email from someone you don't know it is at least possible, if not likely, that the email contains or contained a virus. i.e. if it has attachments do not open them... if it doesn't have attachments then it probably did when it was sent but antivirus software between the sender's outbox and your inbox has removed it!
• if you have received a virus generated email then it was not sent by the person / email address listed in the messages 'From' box!
• Email address spoofing is quite prevalent and is a common headache especially for webmasters such as ourselves that control many domain names and are therefore frequent victims of such attacks / virus infections!
• if your PC starts going very slow and trying to access the internet without an obvious reason then your beloved PC may be nurturing the next batch of virus-infected emails!

I hope you found this information useful... if you ever find yourself in need of anything web, database or search engine-related then please consider using me-too.net - thanks.