Computer Viruses and eG Users

[Jason Perlow]

There have been several inquiries today about an email virus going around that appears to be coming from random @eGullet.com addresses.

The virus infected emails that many of you are receiving has nothing to do with eGullet. The site is way ahead of the curve on server-side security, and Linux (the operating system eGullet uses) is not typically susceptible to this sort of attack.

If you have been reading the various virus alert web sites such as SARC, you've no doubt read that this is a Windows/e-mail worm problem. Those who are heavy users of eGullet are likely to see a lot of eGullet e-mail addresses pop up because of the degrees-of-separation phenomenon displayed by many e-mail worms. Infected users may have cached web pages on their machines with eG user email addresses on it, or email addresses in residing in postbox files (like your Outlook user file) that the virus is using to attack other machines.

In this case the W32.Novarg.A@mm worm is the culprit here, which means all of us should make sure our virus software is updated as of today (this worm was only discovered on January 26). But even if your computer isn't infected, you may get a ton of these e-mails for some time to come.

For more information:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data...ovarg.a@mm.html

Edited January 31, 2004 by Fat Guy (log)