"Why did I get a virus from name@allakhazam.com?"Follow

If you recieve an e-mail from username@allakhazam.com (any username. kaolian, allakhazam, one of the asylum posters, etc. doesn't matter) this does not mean that that person actually sent you a virus.

One feature of modern viruses, is that they can grab e-mail addresses from pretty much anywhere. This means that just one infected person viewing the website, which creates temporary cache files that the virus can use, can actually be responsable for sending out viruses "from" multiple people.

There are also new sneaky viruses that can look at the e-mail address it is being sent to, and emulate it enough to send a nasty e-mail.

For example, for the address kaolian@allakhazam.com, the virus is capable of generating a message like this:

"Kaolian, the Allakhazam adminsitrators have detected illigal activity on your account, and it will be shut down immidiatly unless you send all your personal information and banking info to this address immidiatly"

Usually they are more threatening than that, but you get the idea.

Allakhazam staff members will almost never send an attachment via our allakhazam addresses, and if we are sending you an attachment we will make sure you are aware of it ahead of time. I personally use my @rr.com address most of the time anyways. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Edited, Mon Jul 26 16:59:06 2004 by Kaolian

Kao, email addies can be spoofed with anything. Doesn't have to be a virus. :P



For example...
I sign up for a free email adress somewhere, alot of which have the ability to choose what you want to display the from field as, though it's generally the "respond-to" field in the forms.

So everyone is getting a lot (well, relatively) of spam / viruses from other @allkhazam.com members? I'm getting 5 virus attempts today, and I just got an automated E-mail back from some company saying that my @allakhazam.com E-mail has begun sending these viruses (or is being spoofed to do so or whatever). Worries / pisses me off.

This is the W32.Sober.O@mm virus (at least the one that I'm getting hammered with) I'd download symantec's removal tool just in case

It iterests me that Allakhazam so suddenly became overun with it. Almost as if someone is attacking Allakhazam.

Alot of the message I got were "failure to send" where my usagichanUNICORN@allakhzam.com account tried to email our_secret.zip (which is the virus of course)
I've yet to get one sent directly to ME
the one's I've gotten so far are to:
mail-user@allakhazam.com
mailboxes@allakhazam.com
LerazHolymight@allakhazam.com

Of course, if you don't open the zip you should be ok.

Send Rogues at it.