Grab RSS FeedYour email has been hacked. An E-mail worm is an infection that uses your system to send out mass mailings. It will generally grab your address book and send an email to everyone you know. They expect that your colleagues will open mail if it comes from you.
The new generation of E-mail worms are getting trickier and using address spoofing to help hide the worm. When a system gets infected, the worm sends out an infected E-mail to everyone in the address book. The difference is that it uses a random address in the address book as the from address. This makes it look like the infected mail came from someone totally different that may have a clean system. This person generally gets blamed by everyone for sending out the infected E-mail when they actually had nothing to do with it thus making it more difficult to track down the actual infected system.
If you are accused of-, or think you may have an infected computer system, take these steps.
- Run a virus scanner and a malware scanner to make sure that your system is actually clean.
- Look at the headers of the E-mail to see where it actually originated from as this can help convince people that you are not the one who is infected. Here is a good site to help you interpret E-mail headers. http://www.mxtoolbox.com/emailheaders.aspx
- Send a link to this article to your accuser so they can better understand how Worms and Spoofing work.
For more information or assistance, contact Sudbury Computer.