Hey:
When I returned from vacation, I had four virus alerts from SBC, which told me that possible virus material had been detected.
What was weird was that two of them had identifiable chiffy names, one SUPPOSEDLY from LeeMarsh and one from Aaron Walden. I so quickly deleted them that I forgot to write down the exact email addresses, because I was wondering if a) they were piggybacked on actual chiffsters accounts OR b) they were fake email addresses hiding actual sender.
If you guys actually sent me emails, let me know. See, I don’t display my actual email address here, so that is what makes it very suspicious. Perhaps the whole chiffboard membership database has been hacked.
Dale posted a message recently about having had a virus on his computer. I got like 200 undeliverable email responses in less than 48 hours right at the end of March. I am beginning to think that this was the cause of that.
I did not do any close checking and just did wholesale deletions of them.
Walden didn’t have to send an email in order for it to have Walden’s return address. Viruses can randomly choose Walden’s address out of someone elses, who has his address in their address book, and make you think it came from him.
I second that! I had the same problem a couple of months back. I received a few infected emails that supposedly came from Chiffers, Norton got rid of them before they could do any damage. But at the same time, other Chiffers kept emailing me saying I was sending them the same virus! I knew I couldn’t be because Norton wasn’t letting it in. In the end, I got an email from one of my customers and she had had a virus that was sending out email. I am confident that all of our email address’s were on her computer and the virus was using them at random for the return address’s. It really can be a bummer when people think you are sending them viruses!
All the best and don’t worry about it, if Norton is catching them, your computer isn’t!!
Besides the Chiffboard database itself, the only Chiffsters who have my email address at home are: Stout, Susanfx, NancyF, Serpent, Jessie and maybe Kevin (Dazed in LA)… Jessie was most recent in connection with raffle but who knows…SBC seems to do a pretty good job. They send you an email telling you that they have detected one then you can view the sender name and message. That is educational because the message is tricky. One said: Here is the info you requested, for example…
If the Chiffboard was hacked, I wonder if there would be massive amounts of these mails all at once instead of just a few.
What Sandy said is pretty much the way these worms work. There is no need to hack databases, they simply use email addresses they find on infected PCs and use them to populate the ‘from’ fields of the virus-bearing mails they generate. This is a stunt known as spoofing, and is now standard practice among virus writers and script kiddies.
A regular visit to www.symantec.com is always time well spent. Click their ‘Security Response’ link for latest virus info.